Encore 0.3.0

Added

• Encore now says so on screen when a newer release exists. The check has run at every launch
  since 0.1.0, but the only place its answer appeared was the Updates row in Settings, which
  nobody opens to find out about something they do not know is waiting. A newer release now opens
  a prompt over whatever the app started on: it names the release and the one running, says what
  this particular install does about updates, and offers the release notes, Skip, and Download and
  install. Skip means not now and not never. Nothing is written down, so the next launch asks
  again, and the prompt says as much before the button is pressed. Download and install starts the
  same download the Updates row starts and puts you in front of that row, where the percent and
  the Restart button already are, so there is still one update flow and one place the per-platform
  rules are written. On a copy Encore cannot replace, a snap being the one most people will meet,
  there is no install button at all and the sentence in its place is the one that does work:
  snap refresh encore. Reading the notes does not count as declining. The panel opens over the
  prompt and the prompt is waiting underneath when it closes.

• Three things can now want the screen the moment Encore starts: the first-run tour, the what's
  new panel after an update, and the update prompt. They share one layer and only one of them is
  ever drawn. The update prompt is last in that order and yields the whole launch rather than
  queueing behind, so dismissing the tour or the changelog never hands you a second card, and a
  fresh install is never told about an update by the copy that was just installed. The decision is
  made once, after the settings have loaded, which is the moment the other two decide, so a check
  that answers quickly wins nothing it would not otherwise have won.

• Encore reads Clone Hero's own score files, scoredata.bin and scoresext.bin, so it knows what
  you played before Encore existed. They are the game's high score table: one record per chart, a
  lifetime play count and the best score, kept since long before Encore was installed. What they do
  not hold is dates, of any kind. Nothing read from them can be placed on a calendar or counted
  into a week, so they are stored apart from the plays Encore has watched happen and the two are
  reported separately: the lifetime count for a chart already includes every play Encore recorded,
  and adding them would count those twice. The import runs at startup, which is the only moment a
  play made while Encore was closed can be picked up, and again whenever the game rewrites either
  file. It is a read; nothing is ever written back to Clone Hero's files. The Linux and
  Windows locations have both been verified against a real install. The macOS path follows
  Unity's own convention for where a game keeps this data and is probed rather than assumed. What it finds is
  on the Stats tab, as its own block, and on the play count a chart carries in Installed. Settings
  shows where Encore looked, and lets you point it at the folder yourself when the search is
  wrong, which is also the answer for a portable install or a Clone Hero on another drive. A
  folder with no score files in it is refused there and then, naming what was looked for and what
  was in the folder instead, rather than being stored to go on finding nothing. Encore never
  writes into that folder, whoever chose it.

• When one of Clone Hero's score files refuses to parse, Encore reads the copy the game keeps
  beside it rather than reporting nothing, and says when the figures came from one: a backup is a
  save behind by definition, so it is only ever read when the live file cannot be, and a readable
  pair is never passed over for older numbers. The files Clone Hero has renamed as damaged are
  never read at all, because the game renamed them precisely because it could not read them.

• The "No plays recorded" filter in Installed now also consults Clone Hero's own record, so a chart
  you wore out last year and have not touched since Encore was installed is no longer in the list.
  It is still not a complete answer and does not claim to be: a chart played on another machine, or
  under a Clone Hero whose score files are not the ones Encore found, is unknown either way, and so
  is a chart Encore cannot compute a Clone Hero checksum for. The sentence beside the list says
  which records actually answered, so a machine where the score files could not be read is told the
  list is only what Encore itself has seen rather than left to assume otherwise.

• A Stats tab, holding everything Encore knows about what you have played, out of both records it
  has. From Clone Hero's own score table: your lifetime play count, how many charts you have ever
  played and how many of them you still have, and your best score. From Encore's own log: plays
  recorded, accuracy, full combos, best score and longest streak; the history as a bar per day,
  week or longer, from your first recorded play to today; which instruments and difficulties those
  plays were on; the ten charts you have played most and the last few plays themselves, with what
  each one scored; and how much of your library has a play on record, with the charters behind it.
  The two reach back different distances and the page never lets that go unsaid: every block is
  labelled with the record it was drawn from, ALL TIME or the date Encore's own record starts, and
  the sentence under the title says which is which. The lifetime count already includes every play
  Encore watched, so the page says so where the two sit closest and never adds them. Where a chart
  carries a score Encore cannot read, the play count still stands and only the score is left out,
  said plainly and not as a fault in your files. Nowhere writes "no play on record" as "never
  played". With one record, or with neither, the page says which of the reasons applies and where
  it looked, rather than drawing a page of zeroes. Reached from the sidebar or with Ctrl+5, which
  moves Issues to Ctrl+6 and Settings to Ctrl+7. Home, where the play panel used to sit, is back to
  being a landing page.

• A chart in Installed says how many times it has been played, when there is a play on record for
  it. It is Clone Hero's own lifetime count where the game has one, so a chart you wore out years
  before Encore existed now says so, and Encore's own count where it does not. One badge either
  way, never two: the lifetime count already contains what Encore watched, and two numbers side by
  side invite the one sum that means nothing. The counts are a batch read for each page of the
  list, and a chart with no record in either place carries no badge at all: the list already
  distinguishes "no plays recorded" from "never played", and a zero would not.

• Issues reports what your library holds more than one copy of, in three kinds that are kept
  apart because they mean different things. The same chart file installed twice, where nothing is
  lost by keeping one. The same song by the same charter at more than one version, which is
  usually an update that landed beside the copy it was meant to replace. And the same song by
  different charters, which is not a problem at all and says so. Every copy can be opened in your
  file manager, and the whole report exports as CSV. Encore never deletes a chart: it says what is
  duplicated and where each copy is, and the removing is yours to do. It reads the catalogue
  rather than the disk, so it answers as soon as the tab opens and needs no scan first.

• Explore loads the next page as you reach the bottom of the results, instead of asking you to
  press a button for each one. It appends on its own up to 500 charts, then leaves a button that
  fetches a page and raises the ceiling again, so a long browse stays a list you can still scroll
  and a fast one cannot spend the catalogue's whole rate limit. The button is a real control at the
  end of the list, so reaching more results never needs a scroll gesture.

• The charter, year, album and genre tags on a chart's page are buttons. Clicking one searches
  Explore for that exact value on that field, replacing whatever was filtered before rather than
  adding to it, and opens the advanced panel so the filter that changed the results is on screen
  and can be edited or dropped. The plain search box is cleared, because the advanced endpoint
  takes no search term.

• Advanced search in Explore, against the catalogue's own advanced endpoint. Search by name,
  artist, album, genre, year and charter, each of which can be matched exactly or excluded; by
  ranges of song length, intensity, average and peak notes per second, and year; and by what a
  chart contains, including solo sections, lyrics, vocals, open notes, tap notes, forced notes,
  roll lanes, 2x kick, a video background, known issues, and whether it is a modchart. The panel
  stays shut until you open it, and once filters are applied the button that opens it says how
  many, with a way to clear them.

Changed

• Windows has now been run. The 0.1.0 notes below record that nothing had been, because at the
  time nothing had: the installer was cross-compiled and inspected rather than executed. It
  installs and runs. It is still not code signed, so SmartScreen warns once.

Fixed

• Home reads a chart name as text too. It was the one view left drawing Clone Hero's
  markup, and a name that is nothing but markup now falls back to the folder it sits in
  rather than rendering as an empty line.

• A name written in Clone Hero's own styling markup read as the markup, everywhere Encore drew
  one. Charters colour their names in the game and song.ini and Chorus carry that verbatim, so one
  charter arrived as eight colour tags, one per letter. Installed, Explore, a chart's page, Asset
  Studio, the duplicates report, the preview and the player bar now read every title, artist,
  album and charter as text, and so do the accessible names beside them. What a chart says is
  untouched: the catalogue still keeps the markup exactly as the chart wrote it. The duplicates
  CSV shows the raw name, because it sits next to each copy's path and checksum and exists to be
  reconciled against a library.

• A name written in that markup could not be found by what it reads as, and sorted nowhere near
  it. Search and sort run over the catalogue, and the catalogue held only the raw string, so a
  charter who colours every letter of their name was a separate search term per letter and typing
  the name on screen found nothing, while typing color found every styled chart in the library.
  A title beginning with a tag sorted under <, which put it at the top of Installed. The
  catalogue now keeps a readable form of each chart's title, artist, album and charter beside the
  raw one, and search, sort and the Installed pickers read that. Pasting a line straight out of
  song.ini into the search box still finds its chart. Your library is not rescanned for this:
  Encore fills the new columns from what it has already stored, the first time this build opens
  your catalogue, measured at 0.13 seconds over a library of 20,000 charts, and the search index
  it rebuilds in the same pass comes out a fifth smaller than the one it replaces.

• One charter whose name is styled in one chart and plain in another was two entries in
  Installed's charter picker, each returning some of their charts. That is one entry now, under
  the name as it reads. Artists the same.

• A download of a chart whose name carries that markup landed in a folder named after the markup,
  because the only thing that touched it was the rule that strips characters a filename cannot
  hold. The tags come off first now, so the folder, and the line for it in the downloads queue,
  read as a name. Nothing already on disk is renamed.

• Explore answered an advanced search that matched nothing with "Chorus Encore returned no charts
  at all. It may be having trouble." It now names the filters, which is what an exact charter or
  album taken from an installed chart runs into when that charter or album is not on Chorus.

• Explore only appended a page if the list had been scrolled, and on a window wider than about
  1600px the first 25 charts do not fill the results box, so there was nothing to scroll and no
  page after the first ever arrived on its own. It now fills the box on its own and keeps going
  as the end of the list stays in view, so the button at the bottom is there for the keyboard and
  for the 500 chart ceiling rather than for every page.

• Settings could hang on the two tools it manages. Reading yt-dlp's or ffmpeg's version waited on
  the binary forever, so one that never exited left both rows on their placeholder for the rest of
  the session, and yt-dlp -U on a stalled connection left the Update button disabled with
  nothing to press. The version check now gives up after 5 seconds and the self-update after 2
  minutes, stops the process either way, and says so. A tool that is installed but did not answer
  reads VERSION UNKNOWN rather than NOT INSTALLED, which is what it used to claim about a file
  sitting on disk next to an Update button.

• Typing in the title bar's search box while Explore had advanced filters applied changed the
  results without searching for what was typed: Chorus Encore's advanced endpoint takes no search
  term, so the term was discarded. Explore's own box knew this and turned itself off; the title
  bar's did not. Now a search term clears the applied filters instead, so both boxes do what they
  look like they do and neither is disabled. Explore says how many filters the search cleared and
  offers to put them back. The panel keeps every field either way, so they are one press of Search
  away whether or not the note is still on screen.

Which file to download

• Windows: encore-0.3.0-setup.exe. A per-user installer, no administrator rights
  needed. It is not code signed, so SmartScreen warns once. Choose More info, then
  Run anyway.
• Linux, most distributions: encore-0.3.0.AppImage. chmod +x it and run it. It
  carries a statically linked runtime, so it does not need libfuse2.
• Debian and Ubuntu: encore_0.3.0_amd64.deb.
• Snap: encore_0.3.0_amd64.snap.

Encore can update itself from here. Settings, under Updates, says what this build can do about a
new release and never downloads or installs one on its own.