Keep segmented controls within their visual well, use the active theme for playback indicators, disconnect inactive pulse receivers and improve near-fit song metadata.
cx
can be read
RIP WIZARD, three steps, each answering something the first version got wrong
by not asking. What will happen — which disc, how many tracks, and that the
output is FLAC, stated rather than implied. The tracks, editable, because a
CD-DA carries no titles at all so "named wrong" is the ordinary case and once
files are on disk it is a rename job. And what happens afterwards: a ripped
album the library cannot see is a folder full of files, so the destination is
compared against the registered folders — by path COMPONENTS, not by string
prefix, since /music-backup starts with /music and is not inside it — and the
right follow-up is offered, naming the folder it would re-scan. "Do nothing" is
an explicit choice rather than the silent default. The follow-up runs only on
success.
Tracks can be deselected. Everything is ticked on arrival and the user goes
from all to fewer; a wizard that starts empty makes the common case the one
that costs the most clicks. On the Rust side an absent `selected` means yes, so
an older form cannot silently rip nothing.
A PROGRESS PANEL behind the ripping chip, which is a door rather than a label:
it is the only thing on screen during a rip and the two questions it could not
answer are the ones that matter. A soft lock says not to eject — soft because
nothing here can hold a tray shut, so the honest move is to say it and keep
saying it. Per-track state with a bar on the row that is actually moving.
Stopping is offered, deletes nothing, and says so; a cancelled job does not
jump to 100 %, which is the one lie a progress bar must not tell.
CORRECT DISC DETAILS, for a CD and a SACD image and for neither on a folder,
which has no identity to write a correction under. The list shows what
distinguishes four pressings of one album rather than four identical titles,
and flags a track count that disagrees with the disc. Selecting is not
applying: the candidate is fetched in full and its track list shown, because
that list is the only thing proving a plausible title is the right pressing.
Applying renames the live session without renumbering ids — a re-open would
orphan a playing track — and writes a user row. Only MusicBrainz re-resolves
the cover; Discogs ids are not Cover Art Archive keys and a wrong cover is
worse than the old one. The correction can be dropped, because without an
escape a bad apply is permanent and that makes people afraid of the button.
THE PANE SPLITS BY DISC. A box set scans as one album — measured on a 34-track
set whose album_group_key is the box root for every file while the disc number
sits in the data unused — so the pane was a flat list 247 rows long. The key
carries the disc, unconditionally, because it round-trips through the play-album
lookup. Its own client-side filter over what is already rendered, since finding
one track meant scrolling past the other 246.
EPHEMERAL TRACKS LOSE WHAT CANNOT OUTLIVE THEM. queue_qt has published
isEphemeral on every row for a while and the queue panel respected it; the bar
never read it. The heart goes inert, the add menu keeps only its queue actions,
and the row menu comes back with those three and nothing else. Absent rather
than rendered-and-inert.
Also: a spinner on Open that blocks a second click onto a drive already being
read, held by a counting RAII guard because opening is a relay and the chip
must not blink off in the seam; the now-playing card routes a disc to the pane
it came from instead of to an album id no catalogue can open; the file pickers
use rfd, the platform's own dialog, which the POC-NOTE said was a five-line
change once the dependency existed — it existed, Settings had been calling it
from this crate for weeks, and on macOS the four Linux choosers do not exist so
Open folder and Open SACD image opened nothing at all, in silence; the empty
state stands down for the Open pane, which on a machine with no library drew
both fully painted; tooltips on every disc control through one hover() helper,
since two call sites had already mismatched their key, which does not fail —
the bubble simply never goes away.
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Accumulated qt-frontend work from the 2026-08-11/12 sessions (cc),
uncommitted until now: the app-wide dynamic background in both modes
(AmbientField with GPU/Canvas arms, AppShell layering, ambient palette
pipeline), the wave-1 clip/batch sweep across the tree (alpha batches
449 -> 327, reproducible), the rounded-cover and icon-tint arms, and
scripts/qt-batches.sh (batches + presents/s sampler).
The GPU behaviour of these pieces was finalized in the follow-up pulse
commits; see qbz-nix-docs/qt-frontend/2026-08-11-scenegraph-batches/
GPU-COST-INVESTIGATION.md for the full campaign.
km
The Small bar hand-rolled a reduced copy of the song card inline: album
art plus a two-line title/artist block. All three features the owner
reported missing live in SongCard.qml and only there -- the "layers"
playback-context glyph with open-context(), the album name in the meta
row, and the hover area that publishes the floating art preview. The
overlay itself was already mounted shell-level with no bar-mode gate; it
simply never had a writer while Small was loaded.
PlayerBarSmall.slint mounts the shared SongCard with text-center, so
this is the port catching up rather than a redesign: art-size 37,
art-border 3px surface-card, show-badges false, title 13px, art-text-gap
9. The 18px meta row fits the 39px controls row with ~1px clearance, and
the loading scrim on the cover comes along with it, as it does in Slint.
Also folds the responsive tier arms into shared helpers so the four bar
modes cannot drift apart on the 1366/1920 breakpoints.
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Port of ArtPreviewOverlay.slint: hovering the small cover floats a 220px
preview above it. Missing in every bar mode except Large.
Non-interactive and mounted last in AppShell, both for the reason the
.slint records: the original used a PopupWindow and it stole the hover
from the trigger, so the preview flickered open and shut. An overlay that
cannot receive events cannot do that, and clicks pass through.
The anchor rides QbzShell like the drag ghost does -- trigger and overlay
are in different files with no shared id.
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**Icons follow the theme.** The bakes are frozen dark-palette hexes, so on light
themes secondary, muted and accent were simply wrong, and accent was wrong on
any theme whose accent is not #4285f4. Slint recolours at render time, which
this path cannot do — so the tint is generated once per colour into the cache
and loaded through the same Image+svg path the bakes already use. No effect, no
shader, so it cannot hit the "renders nothing on software" failure.
The sweep found the part the diagnosis had missed: "primary" was two meanings
welded together — max-contrast-on-theme-surface, and literal white for glyphs on
hosts that are dark under every theme. Remapping it globally would have painted
dark glyphs on dark scrims in fourteen places. The vocabulary is split instead,
with "primary" left as an alias so nothing changes until it is migrated
deliberately.
**The album header gradient was Slint's fallback, not its design.** Slint paints
a blurred artwork field and only falls back to the flat two-band gradient when
that image is unavailable; the port shipped the fallback. The field needs no
shader — it is a 128x128 image, so the pipeline ports verbatim: the cover down
to 8x8, back up to 128, blur, colour adjust, vignette. The 8x8 step is the look,
not an optimization; everything after it works from eight pixels of colour,
which is why it reads as atmosphere rather than as a blurred cover. It comes out
of the same decode that already produced the flat tint.
**Covers were point-sampled.** Canvas drawImage does not filter when it scales,
measured at RMSE 0.000 against a nearest-neighbour reference — a 600px cover in
a 200px cell throws away eight of every nine pixels, and the error is aliasing,
not softness. Rust now produces a derivative at the drawn device size so the
draw is 1:1 and there is no resample at all.
**The now-playing context stack.** It had no Qt counterpart: the model carried
context_kind and context_id, some builders stamped them, and nothing ever read
them back. The album path only appeared to work by coincidence, because the
glyph was hardcoded to open the album.
Plus: Discover's missing rails with real play history, Recommendations on the
integrations, queue drag reorder, and the playlist detail collage.
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**Track-row buttons did nothing.** Declaration order is z-order in QML, and the
row-wide MouseArea added for right-click was declared last — so it covered the
heart, cloud and menu buttons and swallowed their presses.
propagateComposedEvents cannot rescue that: a press is not a composed event,
which is why only the row's own double-click still worked.
**Covers appeared only after a scroll.** Three compounding defects, not one. The
window report fired on contentY and on model change, both of which happen while
the tab body is still hidden behind its loading flag, so the report that
mattered hit the not-visible early return and was discarded with nothing to
re-fire it. The debounce reset on every change, so a burst of mount-time reports
kept pushing its trailing edge out. And a single pending slot meant that when
two surfaces are mounted at once — the artist rail and that artist's grid — the
second overwrote the first, so one pane was never requested at all. Eviction had
the same shape: each report deleted everything outside its own array, so the two
panes deleted each other's covers.
**Latest release had no cover** because the artist page's collector skipped it,
along with Appears On and the playlists strip.
**Light themes.** The mechanism is Slint's, from 2.0.2 and issue #638: the
on-surface arm on circle actions, header-light deciding the header foreground
only when a dark backdrop is actually painted, and the circular backing behind
the track-row play glyph. Ported as specified rather than approximated. Two
icons rendered in their SVG's own colour because they pointed at the raw asset
instead of a baked tint — a sweep found the rest of that class.
**Navigation flyouts** exist, one component serving both the sidebar and the
header nav modes.
**Filter by genre and the Discover sort now work**, everywhere the control is
drawn. The genre ids were already a parameter on the discover fetch that the
port always passed empty.
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The info button on both bars did nothing. The modal is ported from Slint, and
the document behind it — title, album, artist, duration, quality, ISRC, label,
copyright and the grouped credits — comes from a new track_info_qt module.
Credit parsing and its role localization were already frontend-agnostic in
qbz-qobuz, so this only fetches and shapes; it does not re-implement them. A
local or Plex id is rejected before the request rather than sent to the Qobuz
catalog API, which is how a local album path ended up as a 404 in the owner's log.
PlayerBar was 708 lines and still carried an inline SongCard, transport cluster
and favourite toggle; those are their own files now, so the bar leaves this
change smaller than it arrived.
The volume controls in both bars are wired to the lock from the previous commit.
cc
vicrodh