The visualizer's PCM cache decoded the entire episode into RAM (22050 Hz
mono s16 ~160 MB/hr of audio) and held it until stop() — a 3-hour episode
pinned ~500 MB and long-form content hit 2.5 GB. The 4x decode also pulled
the whole remote file even when only minutes were listened to.
- audio-pcm-cache: sliding window around the playback position — the
decode head caps at maxAheadSec (600s) ahead of the cursor, segments
older than keepBehindSec (300s) are pruned, and the tail refills as
playback advances. Steady state ~40 MB regardless of episode length;
a backward seek past the window restarts a segment there (the existing
seek-hole mechanism, no new failure mode).
- feed: cap the full-parse episode cache at 1000 episodes/feed so
archive-heavy subscriptions can't pin their entire history in RAM;
the visible list stays bounded by the user's cache preference and
fetch-more keeps working within the ceiling.
- tests: pin the new head-cap and prune contracts (8/8 in
audio-pcm-cache.test.ts; full suite 193 pass).
Also includes the in-flight cleanup/refactor pass (cover-art resolve
helper, page and comment tightening, ESLint config removal).
Add episodeCacheMode/count/days preferences (default: date, 60 days).
Apply the bound when reading instead of writing, so a preference change
takes effect without a refetch; the full parse cache stays intact so
fetch-more can page beyond the bound. Thread the window through
load/saveFeedsToFile and update tests and task docs.
The boot refresh blocked the UI for up to 195ms per sync block with 10
large feeds (500 episodes × 10KB descriptions), causing noticeable freezes
when navigating to Feed during startup.
Root causes and fixes:
- getRSSItems matched items on the full XML (16ms/feed) AND fetchEpisodes
ran a separate getRSSChannel regex (20ms/feed) — a redundant 5MB scan.
Eliminated getRSSChannel; parseChannelCoverUrl now works on the full XML
directly (itunes:image appears before items, so the first match is the
channel cover).
- parseEpisodesIncremental ran getRSSItems (full-XML regex) + the first
25-item parse chunk before yielding. Added yieldToUI() after getRSSItems
so the renderer paints before parsing begins.
- Reduced PARSE_CHUNK_SIZE from 25 to 5 so each sync block between yields
is at most 5 × parseRSSItem (~5ms), not 25 × (~25ms).
- Added yieldToUI() before sortEpisodesReverseChronological in
fetchEpisodes and loadMoreEpisodesForFeed so the sort doesn't pile on
the last parse chunk.
- Added yieldToUI() after response.text() in fetchEpisodes so the renderer
gets a turn before any sync regex work begins.
Measured with 10 feeds × 500 episodes × 10KB descriptions (worst case):
max event-loop block 195ms → 53ms, total blocking 593ms → 292ms.
The card put the podcast name in the title slot ('Podcast — Episode'
prefix truncating on long names) with an empty artist slot for local
playback — the downloaded files carry no artist tag. Now:
- mediaTitle is the episode title only (UI + CLI); streams keep their
artist from stream tags, matching Apple Podcasts' title/artist layout.
- downloads are tagged at completion (ffmpeg -c copy, atomic rename):
title=episode, artist=podcast — verified on a real 72MB file in 1.5s.
The download wrote its sibling .jpg with Bun fetch — which hangs in
compiled binaries, so shipped builds never produced offline cover art.
Now curl (same flags as the cover cache). Also falls back to the
episode's own image when the feed has no channel cover (URL-added
feeds like The Fifth Column). mpv --cover-art-auto=exact picks up the
same-basename .jpg (verified against mpv 0.41).
The Fifth Column (and any feed added by URL) had NO coverUrl — the RSS
parser never captured channel artwork, so Now Playing had nothing to show.
- rss-parser: parseChannelCoverUrl (<itunes:image href> / RSS2 <image><url>);
parseRSSFeed sets it on the Podcast.
- feed store: fetchEpisodes returns the channel cover; subscribe + both
refresh paths backfill coverUrl when missing (no second fetch).
- useAudio + CLI --play: cover resolves feed.podcast.coverUrl ?? episode.imageUrl,
so episodes without channel art still get their own image.
- useAudio play/load/switchBackend: prefer the downloaded file
(getDownloadedFilePath) over the stream URL — downloaded episodes now
play from disk.
Verified: Fifth Column episode, cold cache -> cover-art-files set at load
-> albumart track present.
loadMoreEpisodesForFeed's hot-cache path ran fully synchronously (no
await between getFeed and setFeeds), so the isLoadingMore spinner never
painted and keyboard input froze through every feed in a loadMoreAllFeeds
batch. Add await yieldToUI() before the setFeeds so the renderer gets a
macrotask turn to paint and process input between feeds.
Drop the "Loading…/Refreshing…/Downloading N" label text from the global
activity indicator — render the braille spinner only, per request.
Prefetch alone can't cover every first play (any surface, feeds outside
the FeedPage focus window, quick plays) — the live session showed
cover-art-files empty with zero albumart tracks on a cold-cache play.
play() now serves the disk cache synchronously and, on a miss, awaits the
single-flight fetch with a 1.2s cap (covers fetch in ~300ms typically);
past the cap it plays bare and warms the cache. Verified: cold-cache play
-> cover present at load -> albumart track.
Two gaps left cover art missing for the most common play paths:
- Boot-restore preloaded the episode with cachedCoverPath??undefined racing
the fire-and-forget prefetch; a cold preload + fast-path play re-applied
art via video-add, which produces a NON-albumart track (verified) that
mpv's Now Playing artwork logic ignores. load() now awaits the bounded
fetch (covers ~300ms, 8s cap) so the cover is present at load-time.
- Removed the dead video-add re-apply (fast path + addCoverArt method +
interface) and the play() late-add fallback; a cold-cache play now
prefetches for next time instead.
- FeedPage prefetches covers for the focus window (single-flight, cached)
so ordinary plays land on a warm cache.
Verified: preload with awaited cover -> albumart track present (2 tracks).
Persisted feeds keep only episodes from the last 30 days (plus completed
downloads); older episodes live in volatile memory and survive refreshes
via union merge, with per-feed in-memory caches capped at 500. Refresh
batches run at FETCH_CONCURRENCY=4 with per-feed incremental apply (no
Promise.all barrier), config.json writes are trailing-edge debounced
(250ms, immediate flushPendingSave for unsubscribes), and cold
fetch-more refetches abort at FETCH_TIMEOUT_MS. A shared activity store
powers a global top-right indicator covering refresh, fetch-more,
subscribe, search, and downloads.
Also includes the in-flight incremental RSS parsing (chunked with
event-loop yields) and refresh spinner work this tree already carried.
The pinned mpv binary breaks on brew ffmpeg major drift (libavcodec.62 vs
.63 shipped a dead player); making it self-contained costs ~100MB for an
app icon. Removing the whole machinery: build.ts app-bundle assembly,
audio-player bundled-binary resolver + probe (spawns PATH mpv again),
CI mpv install + bundle smoke checks, AppIcon.icns, README note.
Cover-art staging (curl + --cover-art-files) is unrelated and stays.
ensureDecodeAround let a running decode pass close ANY forward gap in
place — at 4x pacing, skipping 30 min ahead meant ~7.5 min for the
frontier to arrive: bars held their last frame indefinitely. Now a gap
beyond 15s restarts the pass at the seek target (network coverage there
in ~1.6s, verified); smaller gaps close in place (cheaper than a
reconnect + range request). Seek-key holds are debounced (400ms) so
rapid re-seeks don't reconnect-spam the stream's server, and pending
seek-decode cancels on pause/stop so no ffmpeg restarts while paused.
Also fixes a pre-existing config-write race that intermittently failed
visualizer-toggle.test.ts: updateConfig re-resolved the config path and
re-read the patch state when the deferred write-chain drained, so a
queued save could land in a directory XDG_CONFIG_HOME had since been
pointed at (or carry state mutated after queueing). Path and patch
snapshot are now captured eagerly at call time.
Two fragility points, rebuilt at the root:
Playback: one resident mpv daemon (--idle --keep-open) with a persistent
IPC connection and observe_property state instead of spawn-per-episode and
connect-per-poll. Play/pause/seek are sub-ms commands; time-pos pushes at
~20Hz; external pauses arrive as events. Boot session restore preloads the
episode paused (loadfile + paused time-pos seek, since mpv defers --start
stream work until playback) so first Play is a ~400ms unpause instead of a
cold 4.3s open+seek. Load ops are mutex-serialized so a raced preload
cannot clobber an in-flight play.
Data throttling: mpv demuxer cache capped (cache-secs=90, max-bytes=40MiB)
so a paused preload no longer races to its 150MiB default (measured
45.7MB/12s); decoder paced at 4x realtime instead of 84x so playback start
isn't starved by the visualizer ripping the whole episode.
Visualization: replaced the paced-ring reader (AudioStreamReader) with a
position-indexed PCM cache (audio-pcm-cache). ffmpeg fills a cache indexed
by absolute playback time; reads at the player position are always exact.
Pause freezes the render loop, resume re-arms it — no coverage guessing,
no clamped-buffer freeze (the pause->broken-waveform->freeze bug). Seeks
and speed changes need no pipeline restarts; uncovered reads return empty
and the last frame holds.
Cover art: persistent per-URL disk cache under XDG cache dir; play() no
longer awaits a curl subprocess (up to 8s). Cache hit = one stat; misses
apply late via mpv video-add.
Test suite: 161 pass. New tests pin the position-index contract (sample-
exact window reads, hold-on-uncovered, pause-keeps-cache, seek segments),
the daemon contract (play/pause/resume/seek/stop, preload fast path,
EOF->replay), and cover cache/single-flight/404.
The waveform's ffmpeg decode + cavacore FFT pipeline lived inside
RealtimeWaveform, so switching away from the Player tab unmounted it and
killed the pipeline instantly — respawning ffmpeg on every return.
Move the pipeline into a module-level store (stores/visualizer.ts) that
outlives the page:
- losing Player-tab focus keeps the pipeline warm for
VISUALIZER_UNLOAD_DELAY_MS (30s), then tears it down (kills ffmpeg,
destroys the cava plan); regaining focus within the delay resumes the
warm pipeline with no restart churn; after an unload it restarts from
the current playback position.
- playback signals move to utils/audio-signals.ts (module-level, no
useAudio() owner needed) so the store reacts to play/pause/seek/speed
while no Player page is mounted; useAudio re-imports them.
- render a braille spinner as the loading state for the visualizer
(first play / after unload); stale bars stay on screen during warmup
restarts so the waveform never blanks out for the network-bound cold
start.
- seed the smooth position clock at pipeline start: with the position
still frozen at 0 while mpv opens the stream, the reader sampled a
1-sample window that could never fill, starving the bars until mpv's
first poll.
Pins the store contract in tests/visualizer-store.test.ts: loading→bars,
warm resume without restart, 30s unload, and bars while position is
frozen at 0.
mpv can pause or resume OUTSIDE PodTUI — system sleep/lock, AirPod
removal, device swap, OS media keys, the Now Playing center. The poll
previously only reflected commands PodTUI sent, so the UI stayed stuck
on "playing" (or "paused") with a frozen position clock.
The poll now reads mpv's live pause state each tick: an external pause
reconciles the UI to paused (persisting progress, syncing media
controls) while keeping the poll armed; an external resume brings the
UI back to playing. A paused player is polled at a throttled rate
(PAUSE_WATCH_TICKS) so the watch costs ~1 IPC read per second instead
of hammering mpv; a dead process (track end / crash) finalizes the
track.
The release tag bumps VERSION in src/index.tsx, but build.ts hardcoded
0.3.1 in the app bundle's plist — shipped bundles reported a stale version
(lsappinfo/System Settings). Extract VERSION at bundle-assembly time and
interpolate into CFBundleShortVersionString/CFBundleVersion.
- build.ts: darwin compile now exits 1 when mpv is absent — CI can no
longer ship a PodTui.app without its bundled player (0.4.0 did, killing
Now Playing attribution).
- audio-player.ts: the bundled mpv is probed (--version) at first resolve;
it links against brew's dylibs, and a Homebrew ffmpeg major upgrade can
break it — fall back to PATH mpv so audio survives (icon degrades to
blank instead of playback dying). Probed once per process.
- release.yml: brew install mpv on darwin runners; smoke test now asserts
the tarball's PodTui.app has a launchable mpv signed with the
com.mikefreno.podtui identifier.
Store the playback volume in app settings (config.json) whenever it
changes and re-apply the previous session's level at boot, instead of
always starting at the old 70% fallback.
- AppSettings gains volume (default 1 = 100%); both default-settings
copies and the volume signal default are raised from 0.7 to 1.
- doSetVolume persists via the app store (mirrors playbackSpeed).
- The boot sync awaits the app store's async config load (new
whenReady()) so a persisted level is applied even when settings load
finishes after useAudio mounts.
- tests/volume-persistence.test.ts: default, clamp, and cross-session
reuse (fresh module instance simulates the next launch).
Reload the episode that was loaded in the player when the previous run
ended (persisted on play/load and synchronously at exit) into the Player
tab paused at its saved position — never autostarted. Episodes at or
above 98% completion are skipped, as are empty-player and unsubscribed
episodes.
- useAudio gains load(episode) (sets currentEpisode/position/Now Playing
without starting the backend) and restoreLastSession(), triggered once
at boot and serialized through a chain so a late-finishing boot restore
can't clobber later state.
- togglePlayback branches on a startedPlayback flag: a restored episode
starts the backend from the saved position; a paused one resumes.
- stop() clears the marker; the exit teardown writes it synchronously
(process.exit bypasses async writes).
- feed/progress stores expose whenReady() so restore waits for the async
boot loads; feed store gains findEpisode().
- app-persistence serializes last-player marker writes and exposes
waitForLastPlayerWrite() for deterministic tests.
- tests/restore-session.test.ts: real modules + local RSS feed server;
the real useAudio is imported via a ?restore-test query suffix to
bypass the suite's mock.module leak across shared bun workers.
Episode search results gain d (download), D (delete), x (unsubscribe)
and enter (play for subscribed shows); downloads of unsubscribed shows
are recorded with the show's metadata under a deterministic synthetic
feed id and listed under an "Unsubscribed Show Downloads" section in
My Shows and the settings Download Manager. Classified at render time
by feed id or feed URL, so subscribing re-classifies the downloads and
unsubscribing purges them.
Self-rescheduling refresh timer (default 30 min, configurable via a
Preferences item, re-read on every tick, skips in-flight refreshes).
fetchEpisodes returns null on network failure/timeout so a failed
refresh can never wipe a feed's episodes (addFeed/refreshFeed/
refreshAllFeeds all treat null as unchanged); feeds still refresh on
launch.
History used localStorage, which never exists in the Bun TUI, so nothing
survived a restart. Store the 10 most recent queries in config-dir
search-history.json (same fire-and-forget file pattern as audio-nav.json),
loaded asynchronously at store init. Dedupe case-insensitively, cap at 10.
Regression coverage for the search input's focus flag: it must track
the renderable's REAL focus (useInputFocusNav FOCUSED/BLURRED), not a
flag that outlives it. Clicking off the input drops inputFocused and
keyboard control resumes; s re-enters typing; Esc defocuses; clicking
the input refocuses.
Documents the observed full-suite CPU-contention flake in the header:
both tests occasionally time out in openSearch under suite load while
passing reliably in isolation.
Search now covers individual episodes, not just shows: the iTunes
Search API (entity=podcastEpisode) matches episode titles and show
notes, so a guest or topic finds the episodes they appear in across
shows. Enter on an episode result subscribes to the parent show.
- types: SearchResult becomes a kind-discriminated union
(podcast | episode); EpisodeSearchResult carries the parent show so
existing consumers compile unchanged
- source-searcher: searchEpisodesByType (RSS/CUSTOM return []),
buildItunesEpisodeUrl, cleanDescription (HTML -> text),
mapItunesEpisodeResult (episode id/duration ms->s/audioUrl, reuses
mapItunesResult so delisted shows keep a directoryUrl)
- search: searchEpisodes with an 'episode' cache/dedupe namespace so
shows and episodes for the same query never mix
- stores/search: scope signal (podcast | episode) persisted to
podtui_search_scope; search() branches on scope
- SearchPage: Shows/Episodes pills row with 'tab to toggle', scope-
aware placeholder/empty state/result rows (episode row = title +
Show · date) and preview; toggling re-runs the current query
- keybinds: search-scope-toggle bound to tab (keybinds.jsonc AND the
runtime DEFAULT_KEYBINDS merge so the binding exists for users with
a pre-existing config file); while the input is focused the Shell
router never sees Tab, so the input handles it via onKeyDown +
preventDefault (no double-toggle: the router path only fires when
the input is defocused)
- Shell help overlay documents [tab] shows/episodes
Podcast Index (api.podcastindex.org) ships as a disabled, key-less source
and is only consulted as a fallback when primary search results are fewer
than 3 — never on the hot path, never when disabled or credential-less.
A failed fallback leaves primary results intact.
Credentials are user-supplied: enabling the source pops a dialog that
asks for the free key+secret, prefilled masked (first 3 chars + "...")
when already stored; toggling off never clears them. Secrets prefer the
macOS keychain (security CLI, encrypted at rest) with a plaintext
config.json fallback when the keychain is unavailable; sources carry only
a hasCredentials/credentialStorage marker, and legacy plaintext keys in
existing configs are migrated on load.
Auth follows the documented scheme: X-Auth-Key, X-Auth-Date (epoch) and
Authorization = sha1(key + secret + date). Dead feeds are filtered, feed
URLs are used directly, and episode-scope search is a no-op (no endpoint).
Shows that left Apple Podcasts (e.g. Daily Wire's in 2021) come back from
the iTunes Search API as metadata-only stub records with feedUrl null.
mapItunesResult dropped them, so The Ben Shapiro Show — the #1 hit for
'ben shapiro' — never appeared in search while sibling shows did.
- Keep feedUrl-less results (feedUrl "" + directoryUrl pointing at the
Apple page) so delisted shows stay findable.
- Resolve the real feed from the Apple page at subscribe time
(itunes-feed-resolver: anchor on the collection's adamId, forward-scan
for the embedded feedUrl; Apple serves page variants where the
showOffer block sits thousands of chars after the adamId).
- addFeed refuses feedless stubs whose feed can't be resolved instead of
adding a broken feed; SearchPage surfaces the failure via toast.
- Tests: stub mapping, extractor variants, and an end-to-end subscribe
over a local HTTP server.
Mirrors the Feed tab's '[Fetch More]' row inside a drilled show's episode
list (My Shows depth 1): shows only while the show's cache holds episodes
beyond its loaded window, and advances just that show's window by 50 on
Enter (or automatically at the bottom in auto mode). Same fetchMoreMode
preference drives both behaviors. Adds a store-contract test for the
per-feed pagination path.
The babel-preset-solid JSX transform HTML-escapes static string
children (< > → < >), which opentui renders verbatim — so the
"< > seek" hint displayed its entities. Pass the string as the
content prop instead, which bypasses the transform.
Previously the marquee looped continuously, cycling back to the
start the moment the text finished. Now it holds at the start for
SCROLL_HOLD_MS (10s), scrolls one pass at SCROLL_STEP_MS per char,
then holds again.
Feed and My Shows rows could grow to 4+ lines when a long title was
shrunk by the current pane: flexible text wrapped instead of
truncating, shifting every row below while scrolling. Add
wrapMode=none + truncate to flexible text and flexShrink=0 to
fixed-width cells so rows stay one line tall. Feed rows also move
the podcast name onto its own line. Adds a rendered-layout
regression test at 70 columns (35-col current pane).
Two fixes to refresh order stability (My Shows / Feed sort by
lastUpdated):
- A refresh that fetches identical episodes no longer bumps
lastUpdated (id-set comparison via sameEpisodes), so unchanged
feeds keep their position instead of reordering every cycle.
- refreshAllFeeds now fetches in parallel and applies ONE atomic
update instead of a per-feed setFeeds, which re-sorted the list
once per completion and made order flap until the batch finished.
Adds feed-refresh regression tests with mocked clock.
