Encore 0.4.0

Added

• A third column, to the right of whatever you are looking at, holding the chart you last
  clicked. Its cover, name, artist, album, year, genre and charter; a note highway you can play
  it in, labelled with the track it plays; the instrument and difficulty that highway uses; what
  that track is made of; and what the chart is missing. It keeps its chart while you go to
  Settings or Stats rather than emptying out, the same way the player bar under it already does.
  Below a window width of 1120px it is not drawn, because the columns either side leave it too
  little room to be worth the space.

• The column says what the track you picked is made of, in eight figures: its notes, the
  intensity its charter rated it at, its notes per second on average and at its fastest, how many
  difficulties it carries, how many tracks the chart has, how long the song runs, and whether it
  marks out solo sections. Four of those follow the instrument and difficulty above them and four
  describe the chart. Anything nothing measured reads as a dash and never as a zero, so a chart
  scanned before Encore stored note counts says it does not know rather than claiming the chart is
  empty. A drum chart needing a double pedal says so, beside the drums and nowhere else.

• What a chart is missing is a score in a ring with the checklist beside it. The score counts only
  the checks something actually looked at: a chart in your library is scored out of five, and one
  on Chorus Encore out of the three a search answer covers, because a still background and a
  lyrics track are not in that answer and calling either missing would be a guess. It moves one
  whole check at a time, and the card says what the number is a fraction of rather than leaving it
  to be assumed.

• A bar over the Explore results: how many charts the answer holds, a Hide owned toggle, and,
  once anything is ticked, how many are ticked and one button that queues all of them. Hide owned
  works a chart at a time rather than a song at a time, so owning one version of a song still
  shows you the others, and it says how many it is leaving out rather than quietly showing a
  shorter list. Anything it hides loses its tick, because a ticked row you cannot see is a
  download you did not ask for.

• Issues opens with the state of your library instead of with a list. Two cards on Linux and three
  elsewhere count the charts that are broken, the charts scan-chart has something to say about,
  and, where an mp4 background plays, the charts carrying one that would not play on Linux. Each
  counts across the whole report rather than what is on screen, and each is the control that puts
  its own rows in the list below. One chart can be counted by two of them, and the line under the
  cards says so rather than leaving the numbers to be added up wrongly.

• The two findings Encore will not repair now say why on the row, because a missing button is
  otherwise read as an oversight. It will not delete a chart file, since which one Clone Hero
  reads is what it matches charts by, and removing the wrong one costs that chart its multiplayer
  and its play history. It cannot fill in a difficulty rating either, and neither can Chorus: a
  chart matched there by hash is the same upload and carries the same blank.

• Launch Clone Hero and My library, in the title bar beside the search field. Launch starts the
  game and lets go of it, so closing Encore does not close Clone Hero; My library opens the folder
  downloads land in. With no game chosen yet, Launch takes you to the setting rather than failing,
  and when the game refuses to start the reason appears under the button instead of nowhere.

• Settings asks where Clone Hero is, under Library. Encore does not look for this one: the game is
  installed wherever you put it, so a wrong guess would be worse than asking. On Linux that is the
  AppImage or the extracted binary, and a file nothing can start is refused with what to do about
  it rather than stored; on Windows it is the .exe. Launching is not offered on macOS, which
  nobody has been able to test.

• Installed marks a chart Encore's own issue scan found problems in, the same dot Explore draws
  for a chart Chorus found problems in: nothing on a clean chart, a hollow dot for charting notes
  that do not stop it playing, a filled one for a chart that is broken. It reads the report the
  last scan left rather than reading your charts again, so it costs nothing and shows nothing
  until you have run that scan once.

• The sidebar carries what it had nowhere to say before: which game the library belongs to, two
  quick actions, which source Explore searches, and whether a newer Encore exists. Some of those
  offer more than Encore can do yet and say so on the control rather than looking live.

• The download folder template shows what it would produce, on the settings the queue would
  actually run with, so the one control written in a syntax no longer has to be proved by a
  download. The example follows the field as you type; the setting is still stored when you leave
  it, not on every keystroke.

• Setlists: your own running orders, built from the button beside the heart in the chart column and
  read in a section of their own, with what each one adds up to and which of its charts your library
  still has. A setlist is Encore's own and the screen says so, because Clone Hero groups charts by
  the folders they sit in and has no setlist file to write to, so nothing here moves a chart or
  reaches the game. Like a favourite, a setlist holds the chart rather than the folder it is in, so
  it survives the chart moving, being re-downloaded or being removed, and one chart can sit in two
  setlists at once.

• Favourites. The chart column draws a heart beside its action, for a chart in your library and for
  one on Chorus Encore alike, and Installed has a Favourites filter that narrows the whole library
  rather than the page on screen. A favourite is kept for the chart rather than for the copy of it on
  your disk, so it survives the chart moving, being re-downloaded as a different version, or your
  catalog being rebuilt from scratch, and a chart you heart on Chorus is already hearted when you
  download it.

• A metadata editor, for the blanks Chart issues finds and will not repair. Correct a chart's title,
  artist, album, genre, year or charter in place, on a folder chart or a .sng archive, keeping the
  rest of song.ini byte for byte. It refuses to report a save unless both of the values Clone Hero
  identifies the chart by are unchanged, and the seven gameplay values it matches charts between
  players by are shown and never edited.

• Surprise me, in the sidebar: five charts you do not have, drawn at random from the whole Chorus
  Encore catalog and shown in Explore. It leaves out the ones with no download, no notes, or a
  problem Clone Hero would trip over, and says so when it ran out of candidates before five.

• The player bar can loop what it is playing, from a repeat toggle beside the volume slider. It
  stays on across charts until you turn it off. There is no shuffle and no skip beside it, because
  Encore previews the one chart you pointed it at rather than a queue.

Changed

• The window is a three by three frame rather than a stack of bars: a sidebar running the full
  height beside a top bar, the view, the new chart column and the player bar, with the nav grouped
  under two headings rather than three. Nothing a view does has changed, and Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+7
  still reach the same seven views in the same order.

• The palette has depth it did not have: six steps of ground where there were two, and four steps
  of shadow, so a dialog, a popover, a card and a row each sit somewhere distinct rather than
  sharing one plane. Every instrument has a colour, rhythm included, and a co-op or six-fret track
  takes the colour of the part it plays, since which controller it is for is already in the label
  beside it. The dimmest text colour is lighter and now clears the contrast floor on every surface
  the app draws it on, which it did not on the darkest of them before.

• An Explore row says what a chart holds for five instruments rather than three: guitar, bass,
  drums, keys and vocals, each drawn as its own instrument in a ring over the pips that count how
  hard it was rated. The ring is lit for a part the chart has, so a part nobody rated still reads
  as present and a part that is not there still reads as missing. Ratings run past the six Clone
  Hero's scale draws, and a chart rated higher fills every pip while the number read out is the
  real one. The row also carries the real album cover at 52px and a band of badges holding what
  used to sit in columns of its own; the three flags that survived are the uncommon ones that
  change a decision, a background video, a double kick pedal and a modchart.

• Clicking a result in Explore fills that column instead of opening the chart page. The list, the
  filters, the order and your place in it all stay where they are, so comparing three versions of
  a song costs three clicks rather than three round trips through a page. "All details" in the
  column is the way to the chart page. Below 1120px, where the column is not drawn, a click opens
  the chart page as it always did.

• Explore marks a chart Chorus found problems in before you download it: nothing at all on a chart
  with nothing wrong, which is most of them, a hollow dot for charting notes, a filled one for a
  chart that is broken. Hovering says what was found. Chorus runs the same checks Encore's Issues
  view runs, so this costs no extra request.

• Explore's filter header asks three questions rather than two. Instrument is which of the ten
  parts Chorus Encore can filter to, difficulty is which charted difficulties exist, and intensity
  is how hard the chart is, which is the same number the rows draw as pips. Intensity is off until
  an instrument is chosen, because a chart is rated one instrument at a time. There is no Vocals
  filter: Chorus Encore refuses one, though a chart's vocal difficulty still shows on its row.
  The results can be put in eleven orders, reaching all eight fields Chorus Encore sorts by,
  including the charts changed most recently, which nothing surfaced before. There is no download
  or popularity order, because Chorus Encore does not keep one.

• Explore's advanced panel speaks the same language as the filter row it drops out of, and reads
  as the header getting taller rather than as a card that landed on the list. Exact and Exclude
  are pressed pills like the chart features beside them, instead of twelve checkboxes asking one
  kind of question a second way, and the fields are grouped by what they ask. It no longer takes
  the results off the screen: it takes what the window has spare and scrolls itself, with Search
  and Clear always in reach. In place of a count the Advanced button already carries, it now says
  when the boxes hold something nothing has been searched for yet.

• Installed's rows say what Explore's rows say, and in the same order: a larger cover, the title,
  the artist with the album, the year and the genre under it, the charter, the difficulty and the
  health mark. They also fold as the window narrows, which they never did before. That fixes a
  real failure rather than making room: at the narrowest the view column ever gets, every title in
  the list was squeezed to nothing and read as a bare ellipsis. A row announces itself to a screen
  reader as the chart it opens rather than reading out everything printed on it, which would have
  been eighteen difficulty bars and a paragraph about the chart's problems.

• Installed and Home draw the difficulty the way an Explore row does, an instrument in a ring over
  the pips that rate it, in place of a letter with its bars beside it. Both keep three instruments
  where Explore shows five: an Explore row can move the difficulty onto a line of its own when its
  column is narrow and these two cannot, so five here would come off the chart's name at every
  width. The ring is the narrower drawing of the two, so both rows give their names room back
  instead.

• Home opens on the state of your library rather than on a title: how many charts you have, how
  many are still missing album art, a background, a video or lyrics, and how many charts Chorus
  Encore has to search. The middle figure links into the Asset Studio, which is the view that acts
  on it. A scan running says so there, with its percent and the way to stop it.

• Home's chart rows are the row Explore draws, six a section with See all for the rest, and
  clicking one fills the chart column the way an Explore result does. The library rows carry no
  problem mark, because nothing has looked inside those charts: the Issues report is not kept
  between launches, so a mark there would be missing more often than it was right. Home with
  nothing in it reads as a step not taken rather than as a failure, and says which step: no folder
  yet points at Settings, a folder with nothing read yet offers the scan, and a scan that came
  back empty says what a chart folder has to contain.

• The first-run screen leads with what it is asking for rather than with the app's name, and when
  no Clone Hero folder is found it is headed "Choose your songs folder" rather than "No Clone Hero
  folder found". Nothing has gone wrong at that point, and it is the one screen a new user cannot
  walk past. The welcome tour has a screen for Stats, and its Installed and Explore screens
  describe those views as they are now.

• The chart page answers what the new column cannot, and stops repeating what it already does.
  Its four stat cards are gone, and in their place it carries the whole of what a chart says about
  its parts: every instrument the catalog stores a rating for, each with its rating as pips and as
  the number the charter wrote, and every difficulty square carrying its note count and that
  track's fastest stretch. It tells apart the three things a chart can say about a part, including
  a rating in song.ini with no notes to match, which is a Rock Band conversion artifact the grid
  now names in words rather than drawing as an empty row. It says where a chart lives and what
  identifies it, folder or .sng archive, its path, when it was scanned, the key Clone Hero
  writes beside a score and the hash the version check compares; it reports what the chart is made
  of as yes, no or unknown, because a row nobody has scanned carries flags that were never
  measured; and for a chart on Chorus Encore it lists what scan-chart found, which the row's
  single dot cannot say. None of that costs a request.

• The Issues view scrolls as one thing. The duplicate report used to sit in the half of the screen
  that does not scroll, so a report with twenty-five sets in it squeezed the issue list underneath
  to nothing with no way to scroll the report out of the way. The cards, the report and the rows
  now share one scroller, and the category chips stick to the top of it so the control for the
  list is still there once the cards have scrolled past.

• The duplicate report is one of those cards rather than a panel wedged above them. What it says
  about the three kinds of duplicate has not moved: the same chart installed twice is the only one
  that offers to remove a copy, the same song at two versions is listed and not judged, and the
  same song by two charters still opens by saying nothing is wrong. A video Clone Hero cannot play
  on Linux is one card on the machines where that is a note rather than a fault, where it used to
  be a filter chip and a separate panel counting the same charts twice.

• Stats opens with what you came for rather than with the first of seven cards. One block at the
  top carries how much you have played, how well, and how much of your library you have played at
  all, each labelled with the record it came from. No figure is drawn twice: the three in that
  block are taken out of the sections below rather than repeated into them. How much of the
  library has been played is a pair of bars, one per record against one total and never one inside
  the other, because the two counts come from tables nothing joins. Stats draws the instruments
  you play in the same colours the difficulty pips use.

• Settings answers four questions rather than listing seven sections: where your songs are, what
  happens when Encore downloads, which Encore this is and where a new one comes from, and what the
  repairs are costing you on disk. yt-dlp and ffmpeg moved out of the update section and in with
  the downloading they serve, since one fetches video backgrounds and the other converts them. The
  library folders sit in a well of their own and their paths wrap rather than being cut off in the
  middle, because three folders differing only in their last segment are three identical rows once
  a path is ellipsised, and that list is the highest-consequence setting in the app: Encore scans
  those folders, downloads into the one you pick, and refuses to write to a chart outside them.
  Removing one now says so.

• Duplicate charts are their own section rather than a card inside Issues, and the sidebar counts
  what it can honestly count: the size of your library, downloads still to come, spare copies, and
  broken charts once a scan has looked. A count is drawn only when there is something to count,
  because a zero would as often mean nothing has looked yet. There are ten views and nine digits
  now, so Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 run down the sidebar as far as the metadata editor and Settings has
  no shortcut, which it can afford: it is the row with its own link in the footer under it. Stats is
  called Statistics.

• Explore asks difficulty as four dots, one per difficulty Chorus Encore takes, and pressing the lit
  one goes back to any. Genre, Year, Length, Charter and Album are chips under the search box, each
  showing what it is set to, and the Year chip fills a decade in one press. They edit the same fields
  the advanced panel holds rather than a second copy of them.

• The sidebar is drawn at the weight the rest of the app is: the mark and the wordmark, the two game
  tiles, the quick actions with their descriptions, and an update card that lights when there is
  something to install. What a control cannot do yet is said in words on a recessed plane rather
  than by fading it out.

• Installed and Home draw their rows the way Explore does: a 52px cover, and the charter and the
  song's length as chips in a band under the artist rather than as columns of grey text at the far
  end of the row. The rows are 16px taller and one or two fewer fit on screen, and the chart's name
  gets between 90px and 190px more room at every window width.

• The chart column draws a note highway while nothing is playing, instead of an empty black frame,
  and the preview plays on that same lane rather than the preview library's: the violet highway,
  accent rails and outlined frets you see before you press Play keep going once you do. The still
  lane uses the preview's own camera, so nothing changes size when a preview starts. The note sprites
  are unchanged, so a chart still reads the way Clone Hero draws it.

• The player bar names the chart and the track it is previewing rather than showing the word ENCORE,
  and says what it is waiting for when there is nothing loaded.

Fixed

• Narrowing the window under 1120px while the chart column was playing something left the chart
  playing behind the hidden column, with the player bar still handing it the transport and nothing
  on screen able to stop it. The column now gives the preview back as it goes.

• Opening the advanced panel took the results off the screen. It never fitted the window: the form
  was taller than the window at a common size and the list under it came back a single pixel.

• A chart whose notes were read and found to carry none was told to run a library scan, which is
  the one instruction that could not help it. The scan is offered only to a chart nothing has read
  yet; a measured zero now says it was measured.

• Stats left a charter's name almost no room at the width where the chart column appears and the
  view is at its narrowest, and put its most-played and recently-played lists side by side long
  before there was room for a song title in either.

• The version buttons in a chart's detail panel have the border they were written to have, and a
  version note reporting an error is red rather than grey. Both have asked since 0.1.0 for a
  colour the stylesheet never defined, so one drew no border at all and the other fell back to the
  colour of ordinary text.

• The selected row in the Asset Studio no longer fades out through a hardcoded copy of an accent
  colour that has since moved. It looked the same and would have stopped looking the same the
  first time anyone touched it.

• One of the three chart sources in the sidebar was squeezed to a 2px sliver whenever the column
  overflowed, which was both window heights most people use, and the other two had their names cut
  short. All three are full rows in a recessed box now.

• The YARG tile's reason for being unavailable was drawn at 3.2:1 against its background, under the
  contrast floor the rest of the app is held to. Unavailability is carried by the surface and the
  words now rather than by fading the text.

• A charter credit longer than its column pushed the chart's name out of its cell in Installed,
  clipped, with no ellipsis to say so. Two style rules tied on specificity and the one that stopped
  it shrinking won.

Which file to download

• Windows: encore-0.4.0-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-0.4.0.AppImage. chmod +x it and run it. It
  carries a statically linked runtime, so it does not need libfuse2.
• Debian and Ubuntu: encore_0.4.0_amd64.deb.
• Snap: encore_0.4.0_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.