**The empty album view.** Opening a local album from Library "All" landed on a
blank page. The mixed feed hands Qobuz and local albums to the SAME card, and
the card always called the catalog open — so a local id, which is a group key
or a filesystem path, went to /album/get and came back 404. It was in the
owner's log before this round as `get_album(/mnt/nas/…) returned 404`; what
changed is that clearing the stale document turned "shows the previous album"
into "shows nothing", which is how it surfaced. Routing now happens in
open_album itself, using the predicate the feed already uses to route
favourites, so every call site is covered at once instead of card by card.
**Header atmosphere.** Both detail pages get Slint's two-band gradient, tinted
from THIS page's artwork through the ported header_tint — not the now-playing
ambient triad, which is a different subject with a different algorithm.
**Artist page.** The catalog/library toggle existed but was broken: a
hand-rolled copy of the shared tab bar whose delegate walked the wrong parent
chain, so it threw on every evaluation and never took its active colours. It
now mounts the shared control. Added the JUMP TO label, the tab-strip search
with the client-side filter it drives, and the year under release-section
albums. The Network panel ran the full window height and never auto-opened; it
is bounded below the tab strip now and opens unless the content is constrained,
as Slint does. The action circles were the wrong size with the wrong glyph
colour and no overlay arm — which would have left them dark-on-dark once the
gradient landed.
**Quality in track rows.** The column rendered a bare tier; it carries the
badge now, in the one shared row component every surface mounts. playlist_qt
was the only producer not emitting the bit-depth line.
**Skeletons hand over instead of disappearing.** They cleared when the PATH
arrived, but the image still had to load and rasterize after that, so the
placeholder vanished and left an empty cell. They now wait for the image to be
ready.
**Local covers.** Most local covers ARE already the scanner's thumbnail, but
re-hashing their path produced a different filename, so each one was decoded,
resized to its own size and re-encoded into a duplicate before being shown.
That was most of the wait.
cc
**Deferred external rows.** The album page awaited the Last.fm row before
publishing anything, so the tracklist waited on an external service plus
MusicBrainz. It publishes in stages now — header and tracks first, then each
Qobuz rail as it lands, then Last.fm — with every patch merged under a
generation counter so a late reply for album A cannot paint onto album B. The
artist page was already staged this way; its views were the part still showing
bare "Loading…" text.
**Skeletons as the standard.** One control, new variants rather than new
components, mounted across the views. Its second job is the one the owner
named: cleanup. A cover that never resolves settles the placeholder once and
reveals the card's own empty state instead of shimmering forever — local albums
with no embedded art produce no artwork entry at all, so a placeholder gated
only on "not arrived yet" would never stop.
**Local artwork streams.** Fifteen seconds to first cover on a 1274-album grid
was one batch emitted after the whole window resolved. Each cover emits as it
resolves now, visible band before prefetch margin.
**Lyrics migrated.** Smooth sync instead of a 1 Hz tick, word-level karaoke
where the document carries it, the surrounding-line dimming, the controls
flyout and the translation layer the v10 backend already supported. Exactly one
row subscribes to the 30 Hz output; the timer drops to 250ms when paused or
hidden.
**Navigation by mouse and touchpad.** Side buttons and a two-finger horizontal
swipe, matching #653 — including the part that matters, which is that a swipe
over a carousel scrolls the carousel. The layer is declared first in the shell
so everything else gets first refusal.
**Context menus.** Brought to the Slint inventory, Play later included, with
right-click opening the same menu as the button everywhere. Entries whose seam
does not exist are hidden rather than shipped inert.
Two controls that rendered and no-opped are now honestly disabled: the My QBZ
nav row, which routes to a view the shell has no case for, and three sidebar
menu entries with no backing call.
The sidebar caret was never a condition bug. The row is a positioner and the
name cell's width ignored the count label, so a folder WITH content pushed the
chevron past the clip — which is why it vanished exactly when it mattered.
cc
Library and Home showed grey squares that filled in unevenly, which reads as
broken rather than as loading. One shared QbzSkeleton — a card shape and a row
shape — now stands in while data is on its way, and each placeholder clears as
its own item arrives rather than all at once, so loading reads as progressive.
The animation is the part that could have undone the point of this track, so it
is capped: a bounded number of placeholders breathe, and the timer stops when
the view is not visible or the window is minimized. Not on focus loss — a
tiling desktop keeps windows visible and unfocused, which is the rule already
established for the ambient field.
cc
vicrodh