The first visit shows a welcome screen where one tap starts a guest
session; sign-in moves below it. Guests see a "sign in" pill, are
asked once to sign in after five likes or a first follow, and need
two taps to forget themselves.
Drops are found in the waveform and marked on it; "drop" and the d
key jump a bar before the next one. Long and dj-mix fades start on a
bar once the beat is locked. Radio sheets can be shared as /?r=handle.
The audio features now follow the bar, gaps before drops and the
wobble rate, and a new flare pass draws loops round the drop on each
kick, with a setting under visuals.
Back to the plain bold title, the drawn waveform and the system font from
before the metal look. The spiky drop and its glow, the pre-blurred
backgrounds, the --energy fix, ?debug=drop and the desktop layout stay.
--energy is now set only on the art and the glow, and only when it changes,
so the card is no longer restyled every frame. The halo pulses through
transform and opacity, without forcing layout or paint. The card background
is blurred and darkened once on a small canvas, so the full-screen CSS blur is
gone. The action rings no longer use backdrop-filter, and neither do the mode
tabs and the up-next pill on phones. The chrome layer reads the layout only
after a resize or a font load. The drop's fragment shader skips the icon, the
ring and the frost while none of them shows.
That saves enough to render the drop at up to 1.5 canvas px per CSS px on
phones, up from 1. ?debug=drop shows fps, the worst frame and chrome draws per
second, refreshed once a second.
A distance transform turns the glyphs and waveform bars into a height field
with bevelled edges and some depth, and a shader lights them as metal: a
studio of softboxes, a dark horizon and the card's colour and art as the
floor, colour split at steep edges, a key light that follows the pointer
(drifts on phones) and flares on kicks, and a sweep over each new title.
One offscreen context serves every plate. The title turns slightly towards
the pointer. Display text uses Bruno Ace SC, bundled; "simple" visuals keep
plain text and the drawn waveform.
Feed modes move into tabs in the bar; likes, history, filters and settings,
and account open as one kind of sheet: a drawer on wide screens, a bottom
sheet with a drag handle on phones, with a scrim, Esc, a focus trap and
focus restore.
Cards get an artist avatar, follow and radio pills, a "new" chip, counts
under round action buttons, an up-next pill and a redrawn waveform with
rounded bars, a reflection and the buffered range. The start overlay names
the track behind a big round play button.
New: undo on dislike, a searchable likes list that plays as a queue
(in order or shuffled), a local history of what played, deep links to a
track (?t=handle/slug), a sleep timer, adjustable crossfade, bass boost,
wheel up (w or a long press on the drop) and more keys.
The kick wave in the vertex shader squared a negative number with pow(), which
GLSL leaves undefined. Mesa returns NaN there, so on Linux the drop's position
pinned to the clamp: it stayed a plain round sphere without wobble, and its
normals split it into a dark yin-yang. The squares are written out now, and the
normal comes from the slope of the displacement instead of two whole positions.
The play/pause icon is one shape whose corners move: each pause bar turns into
half of the play triangle, with a small swing in between, instead of two icons
faded over each other. It sits on a disc of frosted artwork with a lit rim, and a
ring round it shows the track's progress, or runs while the track loads, which
replaces the flat spinner. The surface calms down under the icon gradually
instead of jumping flat, a double-tap no longer flickers the icon, and a mouse
resting on the playing drop shows the pause bars faintly.
Also:
- Low-density desktop screens render the drop at twice the resolution.
- Quality steps follow the display's own frame rate and step back up again.
- A lost WebGL context brings the drop back once it is restored.
- A paused drop keeps breathing at a low frame rate on desktop.
- Without Web Audio (iOS) jumps in the waveform count as kicks, so the drop lands on drops there too.
- Artists without an image get their own colour from their name, so their drop no longer sinks into the page.
- z toggles zen mode: just the drop, bigger, and the music.
The radio button (r) opens a sheet with the artist, their tags and their closest
neighbours instead of switching the feed at once; tapping a neighbour walks the
artist graph. Starting jumps to the radio's first track, the top-bar chip shows the
station, each radio card says why it is there, and an end card offers the way back
when the radio runs dry.
GET /local/artist feeds the sheet and starts crawling a new artist's neighbourhood
(at most every 10 minutes per artist). Artist-radio tracks carry why: seed, related,
or via the neighbour that leads to them.
Tracks get tags from their title, description, artist name and BPM
(styles such as riddim, versions such as VIP/dub/flip, and tempo), stored
in track_tags and shown on cards. Related pages the crawler reads are kept
in track_related, which links artists to each other.
The feed takes ?mode=: riddim (140 BPM, riddim artists and their graph
neighbours first), fresh, deep cuts, and an artist radio that plays an
artist and the artists around them. Opening a radio crawls that artist's
related pages first. The crawler searches riddim-adjacent terms first.
The filters panel picks the feed, each card has a radio button (r), and a
chip in the top bar returns to the normal feed.
The front end moves to web/ (Vite, TypeScript, no framework) and is built
into web/dist, which the server embeds. hls.js is bundled from npm and
loaded on demand instead of vendored.
The feed is a custom pager instead of CSS scroll snapping: drag and flick
with a spring that keeps the finger's speed, a rubber band at the ends,
one page per wheel or trackpad gesture, and only three cards in the DOM.
Playback uses two decks. The next track is buffered shortly after the
current one starts and tracks crossfade through a Web Audio graph; on iOS,
where that would break lock-screen playback, they switch with a cut. An
analyser drives a bass pulse of the artwork and its glow, and each card
takes its accent colour from the artist image. Styles start from design
tokens and respect reduced motion.
Docker gets a Node build stage; legal pages use their own small stylesheet.
nvrl