# Learnings
Record of completed roadmap stages and the durable engineering lessons they
produced. The full stage texts (Why / Work / Exit Criteria as they were
planned) live in git history — `git log --follow ROADMAP.md`, or the tree at
tag `v0.10.0` for the last pre-rewrite version. ROADMAP.md carries only open
work; this file is where completed work and its evidence are recorded.
## Engine rebuild — Stages 1–9 (July 2026)
The July 2026 architectural review concluded the old streaming processor's
problems were structural (a ~5.2k-line orchestrator wrapping a phase vocoder
in corrective heuristics, latency gated at 1.5–2× FFT size, push-based
fallible audio path, divergent offline hybrid). Stages 1–9 rebuilt the crate
around a pull-based varispeed-first engine and deleted the old one.
- **Stage 1 — Walking skeleton** (2026-07-12, `8a1d214`). `src/engine/`:
stage trait, SPSC mailbox + controller/processor split, source ring with
underrun policy, `TimelineMap`, varispeed head, Tape profile; desktop went
pull-native. Tape torture clicks = 0 at 1.5×/1.1× theoretical slew vs the
old engine's 6×/1.5×.
- **Stage 2 — Keylock chain** (2026-07-12, `0033214`). Band split + 560-frame
(12.7 ms) constant delay contract. Found and fixed a real crossover defect:
the legacy `LR4²`-style `LR8Crossover` (four Q=0.707 sections) notches
−6 dB at fc; replaced with a true `LinkwitzRiley8` (Qs 0.5412/1.3066,
allpass re-sum). Cents wobble on the ±8% ride: p95 5.1 vs old 12.2.
**Falsification verdict: the un-keylocked low band won the listening test**
— the vocoder-processed sub was the audible problem, not the pitch-following
bass.
- **Stage 3 — SOLA corrector** (2026-07-13, `e93e5a5`…). Elastic-cursor SOLA
with correlation-matched splices; kick sharpness 1.21/1.18 vs old
0.68/0.74. The small-FFT PV lost 2–4 dB in the top octave, so the SOLA
threshold was raised to cover the full DJ range. **Post-landing lesson: the
crossover seam combs when SOLA's elastic drift parks** — fixed with a
320-frame correlation window (2+ periods at the band edge),
distance-penalized tie-breaking, and sustained-rest drift bleed.
- **Stage 4 — Artifact-first control** (2026-07-13). Track→ring→stage onset
mapping via seqlock anchor + inverted timeline; SOLA splice protection and
strength-gated per-band PV resets. Artifact-guided sharpness ≥ online
fallback ≥ old engine.
- **Stage 5 — Deck semantics** (2026-07-13). Warm-start seeks, gapless loop
wraps, `set_tempo_rate_at` landing on the exact output sample via capped
resampler emission, 48/96 kHz, keylock fade past the DJ range. Reverse is a
host concern (feed reversed source) — the engine range is forward-only
[0.25, 4.0] by design.
- **Stage 6 — WCET flattening** (2026-07-13). One PV hop max per block,
budgeted warm-start priming. Keylock p99.9 ≤ 0.20 at 64-frame callbacks
(bound 0.5).
- **Stage 7 — Parity campaign** (2026-07-14). Final A/B matrix 9/9 new ≥ old
(ride cents 0.23/0.57 vs 1.86/12.19; sharpness 1.16/1.29 vs 0.71/0.74; …).
Rubber Band reference gate required in CI (spectral 0.965/0.970 vs ≥ 0.85
gate). Root causes closed: control read at ingest instead of the
latency-matched position (≈ latency × slope ≈ 2.8 cents on rides); 32-tap
read kernel drooping 1.5 dB in the top octave (→ 64-tap Kaiser); integer
splice quantization scattering HF phase (→ sub-sample fine search).
**Keylock range settled by ear: the small-FFT PV was audibly
phasey/robotic at every boundary it was placed behind — SOLA carries the
entire corrected range**, full keylock through ±20%, release fade
20.5%→35%. The historic "RubberBand anomaly" was the old hybrid batch
driver attenuating chirps ~28 dB — retired with the hybrid.
- **Stage 8 — Batch on the graph** (2026-07-14). `stretch()` renders on the
engine graph with exact output length by construction
(`round(frames × ratio)`, structural latency trim). Streaming and offline
are sample-identical (the determinism gate immediately caught a real
timeline-eviction bug that made splices depend on callback sizes).
- **Stage 9 — Cutover and deletion** (2026-07-15, v0.8.0). `src/stream/`,
hybrid, multi-res, WSOLA, push API, and the never-audible live PV corrector
all deleted; QA re-anchored on absolute thresholds from new-engine
measurements.
## Stage 11 — Wide-range Master Tempo (2026-08-04)
Falsification first, build-out second; both halves recorded in detail at tag
`v0.10.0`'s ROADMAP. Shipped: `WideKeylockStage` — full-spectrum FFT-2048 /
hop-256 identity-locked PV + post-resampler, artifact-only flux-gated
per-band phase resets with a latency-delayed modulation-hold read, T clamp
[0.5, 4.0], constant 2144-frame (48.6 ms) contract, desktop Range selector.
Durable lessons:
- **hop = FFT/8 is mandatory** — 75% overlap caused the −75% tempo blowup
(+7 LUFS spurious energy, ~2000 clicks/M) on every corpus track.
- **FFT 4096 loses on real mixes** (transient smear) despite winning on
synthetic tones, and busts the latency contract.
- Big slowdowns ran "roboty" until the phase-gradient coherence blend was
held on at wide ratios (it tapered to zero near ratio 2.5); blend settled
at 0.20 by live A/B.
- Two mechanisms found by gates during build-out: the resampler ramp's
harmonic-mean consumption drifts stream balance by `hop/2·ln(T₁/T₀)` per
sweep (fixed: `set_step_anchor`); instant full-range T steps tear the OLA
seam (fixed: log-space transposition slew, ~30 ms full-range settle).
- **Metrics twice failed to predict ear verdicts** (down-side robotiness
scored above the clean up-side; blend 0.20 vs 0.40 metrically identical).
Owner listening is the binding gate; metrics are regression tripwires.
- Verdicts: ±50% shippable; −75% documented degradation ("through a guitar
amp"), no silent cliff. **The Rubber Band gap at wide rates is real and
accepted**: single-FFT identity PV vs R3's multi-resolution engine.
## Other shipped work (outside the stage line)
- **Musical key detection** (v0.9.x): HPCP chroma + profile correlation,
Camelot output; 85.7% exact vs Mixed In Key on the corpus; scored by the
BPM harness.
- **Rigid beat grids** (v0.10.0, `026e758`): corpus diagnostics showed the
beat-tracking failure mode was gross phase misplacement (60–180 ms) on
quantized tracks — never wrong BPM. A rigid kick-band fit (constant BPM ×
phase circle, adopted only at `phase_lock ≥ 0.3` plus a smeared-score
floor) took beat F 71.5%→93.8%, downbeat F 20.7%→76.4%. The beat-F gain is
partly self-confirming (annotations share the method); ear verification is
the honest check. Known non-adopters (MSBWY, Hot Stuff, Somebody To Love)
are exactly the annotator's own phase-indecisive tracks — offbeat disco
bass under 150 Hz competes with the kick phase. Diagnosed live 2026-08-03:
Hot Stuff fits 120.000 BPM exactly but phase_lock = 0.109, so the wandering
DP grid ships (intervals 475–569 ms on a constant-tempo track).
- **Performance** (v0.10.x): SOLA/varispeed hot-loop auto-vectorization,
polyphase kernel rows, lockstep multi-channel resampling — keylock mean
2.2×↓, spikes 4×↓.
- **`.tsa` analysis container** (v0.11.0): single binary sidecar; JSON
sidecar API deprecated. Bytes-first persistence (Halo stores blobs in
sqlite; sidecars are a convenience layer).
## Quality review vs Rubber Band (2026-08-05)
Full-code audit of both stretch paths plus empirical probes through the
public API. This is the evidence base for ROADMAP Stages 13–17.
**Measured (probe harness, 44.1 kHz):**
- Duration is **sample-exact** at ratios 0.731 / 0.9375 / 1.137 / 1.333333 /
1.618 over 30 s (0 samples error).
- Stereo through the DJ keylock path is **bit-identical lockstep**
(max |L−R| = 0.0 on identical channels).
- Click trains at ±8%: no flams, placement deviation ≤ 1.8 ms.
- Tape at rate 1.0 is bit-transparent (347 dB SNR at lag 0).
- **Sustained-tone purity above the crossover collapses at DJ ratios**:
3.3 kHz sine drops from 71.6 dB to 23.9 dB (0.92×) / 33.1 dB (1.08×) —
SOLA splice granulation at ~20 splices/s. 440 Hz: 54–65 dB. 55 Hz clean
(but pitch follows tempo, by design). This is the main audible gap vs
Rubber Band inside the DJ window on pads/strings/vocal harmonics.
**Confirmed defects (all verified in source):**
1. **Unwrapped phase blends** — `phase_vocoder.rs:1624-1629` (gradient
blend) and `:1295-1298` (IF blend) linearly interpolate raw phases that
differ by arbitrary multiples of 2π; not a valid phase interpolation. The
gradient blend runs at full 0.20 strength at every ratio in production.
2. **Never-wrapped f64 phase accumulator downcast to f32 each frame**
(`phase_vocoder.rs:1552,1555`) — HF bin phase degrades to noise after
minutes of accumulation; onset resets rescue busy material but the
detector returns zero onsets on sustained tonal material by construction
(`transient.rs:571-579` energy gate).
3. **DC/Nyquist break Hermitian symmetry** (`reconstruct_spectrum`,
`phase_vocoder.rs:1637-1644`) — both bins get accumulated phases and are
excluded from the mirror; `.re` extraction scales them by cos(φ).
4. **Offline wide path uses hop = FFT/4** (`offline.rs:169`) — the exact
configuration `wide_keylock.rs:53-55` documents as the −75% blowup.
Offline wide ratios also never exercise the shipped `WideKeylockStage`
(independent per-channel batch PVs, no stereo coupling —
`offline.rs:186-202`).
5. **Batch `resample_sinc` has no cutoff scaling** (`resample.rs:84-153`) —
`pitch_shift()` downsamples through it (`lib.rs:680`) and aliases;
`AudioBuffer::resample` is plain cubic (`types.rs:631`).
6. **Extreme-rate correction fade is a per-block gain step**
(`keylock.rs:124-127,149`) between two differently-pitched signals; the
toggle path got a per-sample 512-frame ramp, the fade path got none.
7. **`ctx.modulation_hold` is inert on the DJ profile** — SOLA never
receives it (`sola.rs:413`, `keylock.rs:120`); `stage.rs:130-134`
documents behavior the code doesn't have.
8. **The identity test suite tests the bypass, not the DSP** — all of
`tests/identity.rs` and the "strict" ratio-1.0 regression go through
`stretch()`, which returns `input.to_vec()` at exactly 1.0
(`lib.rs:481-483`). No test anywhere runs the PV itself at ratio 1.0.
Related: `stretch_into` lacks the 1.0 bypass entirely.
**Stage 13 follow-up finding (2026-08-05, during the fix):** hop = FFT/8
attenuates tones in the PV's rigid sub-bass region (< ~107 Hz at FFT 2048)
by 5–15× at ratio 2.0, while tones just above the boundary hold the ideal
balance (probe sweep 70–150 Hz; the old offline hop = FFT/4 kept sub-bass
clean at ratio 2 but is the documented blowup at ratio 4). This is a trait
of the *shipped live* wide configuration — consistent with Stage 11's
"−75%: bass reads bitcrushed" note — now pinned by
`tests/stretch_quality_regressions.rs` so it cannot silently worsen.
Improving sub-bass at heavy slowdown is Stage 14/16 material.
**Structural limitations (not bugs — recorded so they aren't re-litigated):**
- SOLA tonal-HF granulation is the mechanism working as designed; the fix
space is a third band, tonality-adaptive splicing, or acceptance — decide
from listening evidence (ROADMAP Stage 16), not tuning.
- The locking has no cross-frame peak continuity (`phase_locking.rs:389`
recomputes per frame; overlapping regions last-write-wins) — the classic
unstable-cymbals source at wide ratios; RB-class coherence needs peak
tracking.
- SOLA's crossover-seam de-phasing under *continuous* rides is bounded but
never recovered while the fader keeps moving (rest recentering needs
~150 ms of sustained near-unity).
- The correlation reference is sampled at the integer floor of the
fractional cursor while candidates are sinc-interpolated
(`sola.rs:587-588` vs `:645-668`) — sub-sample splice alignment is
measured against a phase-offset reference.
- Minor dead weight (all removed in the Stage 14 dead-code sweep): the
DSP-dead `hop_synthesis` field; the dormant identity envelope
"correction"; ~200 lines of production-dead seam re-anchoring pinned only
by its own tests; three `bessel_i0` copies; stale
`Makefile`/`qa/README.md`/`RESEARCH.md` references.
**Cross-cutting lessons this review adds:**
- A ratio-1.0 bypass in the public API makes every downstream "identity"
test vacuous. Null tests must target the DSP object directly, and the
meaningful offline null is *near*-1.0 or engine-at-1.0.
- Phase arithmetic rules that would be caught by a types pass: never
linearly mix unwrapped phases; wrap accumulators; force DC/Nyquist real.
- When a constant is documented as mandatory in one path
(`WIDE_HOP = FFT/8`), grep for the other paths that compute it
independently.
- Sidecar/artifact caches need an analysis-version invalidation policy:
the rigid-grid fix shipped without bumping `PREANALYSIS_VERSION`, so
pre-v0.10 sidecars keep serving worse grids forever.
- **A listening verdict is evidence about the implementation auditioned,
not the algorithm class.** Stage 7 rejected "phase vocoder in the
corrected range" and Stage 11 accepted the wide-rate Rubber Band gap —
both against a PV whose unwrapped-phase blends manufacture the exact
phasiness heard. When a defect is later found in an auditioned
implementation, every architecture decision that cites those listens is
stale evidence and gets a cheap re-audition (ROADMAP Stages 13/16), not
silent standing. Corollary: record the implementation state (commit,
known defects) alongside every recorded listening verdict.
## Stage 13 — Wide-Path Phase Hygiene (2026-08-06)
Fixed the four confirmed phase-domain defects from the quality review
(commit `fb7dcfa`, merged PR #36; fade/hold/version follow-ups in PR #37):
wrapped `phase_accum`, wrapped-difference coherence blends, real
DC/Nyquist, offline wide hop = FFT/8, `stretch_into` bypass parity, plus
`tests/pv_null.rs` — the first tests to exercise the vocoder itself at
ratio 1.0.
- **Measured (A/B vs pre-fix)**: PV-direct null at ratio 1.0 went 59 →
139 dB SER; 5 kHz purity at ratio 1.5 went ~25 → ~57 dB, flat over the
render. Falsification sidecar re-run (300 rows vs the Stage 11
baseline): shipped arm improved mean |LUFS error| 2.75 → 1.90 dB, RB
similarity held, zero click increases; the diagnostic arms running the
buggy paths hardest dropped ~80–125 clicks/M.
- **Owner listen (2026-08-06, ±50%, `norm/` level-matched renders,
implementation `fb7dcfa` + sidecar rerun)**: "significantly better"
than the Stage 11 renders; **the Rubber Band gap narrowed but R3
remains ahead** — the wide-rate acceptance holds on fresher, smaller
evidence.
- Re-pinning lesson: two wide-path baselines had encoded pre-fix behavior
(an edge-ramp-biased pitch measurement window; a two-tone balance band
built around the old low-band loss). Every re-pin was attributed by
stash A/B before touching the band — one "regression" was an
improvement, one was the pre-existing live-path sub-bass trait
surfacing (recorded above).
## Stage 15 — DJ-Band Ride Polish (2026-08-07)
Fade-band per-sample ramp (D6) and the `modulation_hold` contract landed
in PR #37; the core seam item in PR #38 (`c767181`/`629d6d6` line).
- **Characterization before code**: sustained mild rides (0.5–1%
deviation — the mix-in gesture) held the 120 Hz crossover seam at
−7 dB for the whole ride; drift sawtooths to the full 192-frame
trigger and rest recovery needs ~150 ms of stillness. Strong rides and
parked faders were already fine.
- **Fix**: mild-motion bounded recenter — the rest-splice mechanism
without its dwell, at drift > 96 when deviation < 1.2%. Measured:
worst comb −7.1 → −4.4 dB, riding steady-state −2.5 → −1.2 dB, safe
profiles bit-identical, ~5 bounded splices/s.
- **Negative result worth keeping**: simply tightening the general drift
trigger made everything WORSE (−5.5 dB persistent, even at rest) —
unbounded early splices park drift on the dominant-period grid on
periodic content (the #62 pathology). The landing bound is the
load-bearing part of early splicing, not the trigger level.
- Gates: `seam_survives_a_sustained_mild_ride` (fails pre-fix at
−7.14 dB), `fade_band_rate_steps_are_click_free` (fails pre-fix at
~3.5× tone slew); `qa/engine_keylock` + `qa/engine_transients`
promoted into CI. Cents-wobble and A/B-matrix gates unchanged.
- **Owner listen (2026-08-06, live desktop deck, branch `629d6d6`):
"definitely an improvement" — bass body stable through a sustained
gentle ride.** Optional items (fractional correlation reference,
strength-aware protection, modulation_hold wiring) remain
evidence-gated: each lands only if it moves a gate.
## Stage 10 — Tracked-Beat Corroboration for Rigid Grids (2026-08-07)
The three rigid-grid non-adopters (MSBWY, Hot Stuff, Somebody To Love —
syncopated disco, lock 0.109–0.181 vs the 0.3 gate) resisted both
roadmap disambiguation candidates, prototyped and measured before the
fix landed:
- **Slot exclusion failed**: rival-phase landscapes showed the
competitors at *swung* subdivision offsets (Hot Stuff peaks at
6–10/32 period, MSBWY at 25/32), not one excludable anti-phase slot;
stacking exclusion zones until specific tracks pass is
threshold-lowering in disguise.
- **Onset-sharpness weighting failed**: squared-envelope emphasis helped
two tracks but made Hot Stuff WORSE (0.109 → 0.072) — disco bass is as
punchy as the kick in the kick band.
- **What worked: corroboration by an independent estimator.** The DP
tracker (full-band novelty, not the kick-band phase circle)
independently lands ≥ 90% of its beats on the rigid grid for the truly
rigid tracks (MSBWY 0.98, Hot Stuff 0.90) and collapses on genuinely
non-rigid material (tempo-ramp control 0.25 — which phase_lock alone
would wrongly trust at 0.77 — and Somebody 0.28, real estimator
disagreement). Adoption gate: lock ≥ 0.3 OR agreement ≥ 0.6 (mid-gap
between the measured ≤ 0.28 and ≥ 0.90 clusters), sanity floor
unchanged.
Corpus results: MSBWY/Hot Stuff beat F 0.95/0.93 → **1.00**, downbeat F
→ 1.0, offsets sub-ms; 33rd Rate Revs X downbeat F 0 → 1.0; 13/16
harness rows byte-identical; ramp/jitter unit controls green.
PREANALYSIS_VERSION → 9/9 (first application of the CLAUDE.md policy).
Lessons: two agreeing independent estimators beat one reshaped metric —
and when a fixture needs a beater click before the tracker behaves like
it does on real kicks, the fixture was the problem, not the tracker.
**Honest low-confidence display follow-up (2026-08-12, PR #44 +
review fixes).** Estimator disagreement on plausibly quantized material
now caps the stored artifact confidence at 0.5 via an explicit
`BeatGrid::phase_untrusted` verdict, and the desktop dims the grid below
0.6. Somebody To Love: artifact confidence 0.845 → 0.500 (its grid
measures beat F 0.31 — the old 0.845 was internal consistency, not
ground truth). Versions bumped 9 → 10 (second application of the
CLAUDE.md policy — the first cut of the PR shipped without the bump).
Two lessons the review caught before merge:
- **Verify a verdict at the layer its consumer reads.** The first cut
capped `BeatGrid.confidence`, but the artifact stored
`estimate_confidence(...).max(grid.confidence)` and the desktop
displays the artifact value — interval regularity alone scores ~0.85
on a smoothly wrong grid, so the max silently reinstated the
confidence the cap had just revoked, and the feature was inert on the
exact track it existed for. The commit's own verification number
(0.772 → 0.500) was measured at the wrong layer. Verdicts that must
survive downstream aggregation need to travel as explicit state
(the flag), not be smuggled through a value other code maxes over.
- **A shared gate should be one expression.** The cap's "ramps never
reach here" comment was wrong (the capped branch returned before the
sanity floor ran) — a tempo ramp fails both adoption gates too and
was wrongly capped. Fixed by gating the cap on the same smeared-score
ratio the adoption floor uses, extracted so "plausibly quantized"
means one thing in both places; ramp and drifting-tracker controls
now pin confidence and flag from both sides.
Independent corroboration (QM baseline column, same day): QM's
bar/beat tracker also fails on Somebody To Love (beat F 0.37 vs our
0.31, both far below the ≥ 0.95 it and we score on confidently-gridded
rows) — the honest-uncertainty verdict, not a tracker deficiency.
## Stage 12 — Robustness Hardening (2026-08-13)
Adversarial input, no-panic, and soak coverage for every non-RT surface
(PRs #46, #48, and the completion PR). Deliberately no DSP changes.
**Landed:**
- `qa/robustness.rs` — seeded adversarial harness (cargo-fuzz stand-in,
deterministic xorshift, no nightly) over the `.tsa` loader, deprecated
JSON artifact, WAV parsing, and `stretch()`/`stretch_offline` under
hostile params × degenerate audio. `qa/soak.rs` — randomized
deck-gesture marathon (rides/nudges/snaps, warm-start seeks, keylock
toggles, artifact swaps) gating underruns, finiteness, clicks, and
**bounded drift**: source consumption tracks the commanded tempo
integral within a constant 2048 frames (measured worst 197 frames =
4.5 ms over hour-equivalent 60 s runs — the engine's stash is bounded,
drift does not accumulate). Both run per-PR in the CI quality gates;
a weekly re-seeded campaign (`fuzz-campaign.yml`,
`TIMESTRETCH_FUZZ_SEED` = run id, logged for reproduction) runs the
hour-equivalent soak plus the full adversarial sweep.
- Three real fixes found by writing the harnesses, each with a minimized
regression test: `.tsa` PEAK bucket-count multiply overflow → checked
`Err`; `stretch_offline` release-build infinite loop on a partial
trailing frame plus missing channel/ratio validation (the old guard
was a `debug_assert!` — release had nothing); varispeed
`MAX_OUT_PER_FEED` missing the kernel-release term, silently
truncating output on retargets from dilated kernels in release.
- No-panic contract + audit documented in `lib.rs`: all 13 explicit
panic sites in `src/` outside tests are invariant-local; implicit
panics on input surfaces are covered by the harness, not static
audit.
**Lessons:**
- A feature-gated test target has ZERO CI coverage until a workflow
names it — `cargo test --all-targets` skips `required-features`
targets silently, and clippy doesn't even build them. PR #46 shipped
1,200 lines of harness that CI never compiled; the review caught it.
New gates land WITH their CI wiring, not before.
- The most valuable robustness bug was not in a parser: the varispeed
capacity bound was an RT-contract hole (silent truncation swallowed
by a `debug_assert!`). Adversarial thinking applies to internal
contracts, not just input surfaces.
- Consumption-vs-tempo-integral is a cheap, strong soak invariant: it
needed only the frames-pushed counter and ring occupancy, and its
measured headroom (10x) still catches a one-frame-per-callback leak
within ~6 s of audio time.
- **Correction (2026-08-24, campaign run 32688905856).** Sampled
mid-gesture, that invariant measures the elastic reservoir, not the
leak. The flat 2_048-frame bound was calibrated hours before
`WidePvHead` became the wide head (`fb2fe81` 06:41 vs `408c734`
14:00, both 2026-08-13) and was never re-derived: the direct-ratio
head legitimately holds `ARM_SURPLUS_MAX` (8_192) plus its pending
cap in rendered-but-unemitted output, and a rate step revalues that
backlog in source frames by up to the profile's rate ceiling. Tracing
showed −1_902-frame excursions that returned to ~0 on their own; the
campaign simply drew a seed whose seek landed on one. Two lessons.
A gate constant derived from ONE topology's measurement is not a
property of the invariant — the bound is now per-profile and derived
from the head's declared stash. And a peak bound is the wrong shape
for a leak gate: every segment now ends with a quiescent unity-rate
tail, where the same accounting lands on exactly 0 (narrow) or within
±128 frames (wide) across four campaign hours. Window length, not the
bound, is that gate's sensitivity dial — a leak grows with the window,
a quantization offset does not. Verified by injecting a one-frame-per-
feed leak: invisible to the old gate over an hour, caught by the new
one in 0.9 s of CI-bounded soak.
## Stage 17 — Pitch-Shift and Batch Resampler Correctness (2026-08-13)
Batch anti-aliasing (PR #42) plus the direction-inversion fix its
independent review surfaced (PR #47). Off the DJ hot path; public API
quality.
- **Anti-aliasing (PR #42)**: `resample_sinc` cutoff-scales when
downsampling with the streaming kernel's stopband margin
(`cutoff_for_step` policy), Kaiser window via a per-call lookup table
(Bessel out of the tap loop); `AudioBuffer::resample` switched from
unfiltered cubic to the band-limited sinc. Measured: 2:1 downsample
alias rejection 1.9 → 89.8 dB; 48→44.1 ultrasonic fold gated; the
short-input cubic fallback is a documented conscious edge (a signal
shorter than the kernel cannot be band-limited by it).
- **Direction inversion (PR #47)**: `pitch_shift` set
`stretch_ratio = 1.0 / pitch_factor` — a length ratio — so factor 2.0
rendered an octave DOWN (probe: 440 Hz → 220 Hz), inverting the
documented contract, and the real pitch-raising path aliased in-band
at −1.2 dB rejection pre-#42. Fix: `stretch_ratio = pitch_factor`;
the formant tapers were already written to the documented semantics
and needed no change. Gates added: 10x dominance octave tests both
ways, 44.1↔48 round-trip SNR > 40 dB (multi-tone).
- **Owner A/B (2026-08-13, renders from main `0e73acf`,
`target/stage17_audition/`: shipped vs pre-fix-equivalent unfiltered
cubic, +2/+5 semitones on a bright disco excerpt, RMS-matched,
common-trimmed float)**: "the shipped drums sound higher quality, but
the difference is still very small and hard to hear without a trained
ear." Exit criterion met — the shipped path is audibly clean and the
old path's aliasing, while real, was subtle on dense material.
Lessons:
- **An OR-assertion direction test is satisfiable by inverted output**
through its own harmonics — `e_880 > e_220 || e_880 > e_1760` passed
for months while factor 2.0 rendered 220 Hz. Direction tests must
assert the target DOMINATES both the source and the
opposite-direction frequency.
- **Probe the direction you claim**: the original "the shifter is not a
beneficiary" scope note tested pitch-up as factor > 1, which — being
inverted — never downsampled; the measurement was true and the
conclusion backwards. A probe that can't fail the hypothesis both
ways isn't evidence.
- Sine probes overstate audibility on dense mixes again (cf. Stage 16's
purity numbers): −1.2 dB fold rejection sounds catastrophic on paper
and was "very small" on a real club master. Characterize with tones,
decide with ears.
## Stage 16 — Tonal-HF Granulation: Measure, Then Decide (2026-08-13)
The review's headline question answered by blind listening. Audition set:
PR #43 (renderer + purity characterization) with PR #49's validity fixes
(stereo PV arms, RB RMS match, no-clip common trim); renders from
`7f49a50`; 3 excerpts × ±4/±8% × 4 arms, letters shuffled per condition
(`BLIND_KEY.json` opened after the session).
**Characterization (pinned in `tests/tonal_purity_characterization.rs`):**
the granulation floor is strongly ASYMMETRIC — harmonic-15 purity 52 dB
at +8% tempo but 22 dB at −8% (slowdowns re-cross material, so splices
recur through sustained content); two-tone beating survives well both
ways (47/42 dB).
**Blind verdict (owner, 2026-08-13, 12 conditions):**
- **Q1 — granulation is audible in context.** Rubber Band was the
cleanest arm in 9/12 conditions. The shipped SOLA path won twice
(hot_stuff −4%, msbwy +4%), stayed "clean/good quality" on most of
hot_stuff and cold_heart, but degraded to "roboty, bad quality" /
"awful" on msbwy ±8% — sustained filtered strings, the exact
content class the asymmetric floor predicts. Not a documented-scope
close: the structural response is scoped as Stage 18
(tonality-adaptive splice cadence), falsification-gated.
- **Q2 — Stage 7 RE-CONFIRMED on clean evidence.** The phase-fixed
PV-512/1024 arms behind the 120 Hz split were the "robotic /
underwater / vocoder" arms blind — the same artifact vocabulary that
condemned the defective PV in July, now heard with the Stage 13
fixes in and without knowing which arm was which. pv512 was the
worst arm in most conditions; pv1024 followed. "SOLA carries the
corrected range" now rests on an uncontaminated verdict, and the
HF-small-PV-band candidate is dead. (Recorded bias: the PV arms ran
without artifact resets, but the verdicts cite sustained-material
phasiness, not transient smear — the deviation does not rescue
them.)
- Side observation for Stage 14's listen: Rubber Band's msbwy wins came
with "missing stereo, narrow, muted" notes — R3 trades image width
for smoothness on that material; ours keeps the width.
Lessons:
- The blind protocol earned its cost: the letters Rob ranked cleanest
were RB in 9/12 without knowing which arm was which, and the PV arms
reproduced their July vocabulary exactly — both questions settled
with zero suggestion risk.
- A listening verdict really is evidence about the implementation
auditioned (the 2026-08-05 lesson, closed out): the July anti-PV
verdict survived the re-audition, but only the re-audition made it
citable — before it, every SOLA-vs-PV decision cited contaminated
evidence.
## Stage 18 — Steady-Rate Splice-Cadence Stretch (2026-08-13)
The Stage 16 verdict's structural response, falsification-first
throughout (kill-experiment branch `proto/stage18-splice-cadence`;
build-out PR #56).
**Mechanism shipped**: SOLA's elastic drift triggers (normal /
opportunistic / hard) double at STEADY transposition inside the primary
DJ window — splices on sustained tonal material fire half as often and
land with larger, better period-aligned jumps. Three guards, each pinned
by the gate that motivated it:
- **Transposition taper (T 1.09 → 1.15)**: slowdown drift eats the
560-frame nominal-lag gap to the write head; the prototype measured a
cursor stall (sine −16 cents) at T=1.25. Ratio 1.25 in the quality
sweep is the regression pin.
- **Steady-rate gate (`rate_slope == 0`)**: with the stretch active on
rides the A/B matrix measured cents p95 5.65 vs the 1.5 bound — the
slope-tracked pitch correction is drift-proportional and clamps.
Rides keep shipped cadence; `ride_slope_restores_shipped_cadence`
pins it.
- **Asymmetric force band (review-caught, HIGH)**: the stretched hard
trigger (640) sits PAST the write head (lag 560) on slowdowns — under
blocked-splice pressure the forced backstop could never fire before
the read margin was violated. `SLOWDOWN_FORCE_CAP = 448` caps the
force on negative drift (speed-ups keep the full band against ~6x
ring headroom), with a write-head-side construction assert. The same
review added the failed-attempt guard: a forced splice (which tears
through onset protection) is honored only after an unforced attempt
failed, so a ride starting under parked stretched-band drift cannot
skip protection on its first block.
**Measured**: harmonic-15 purity −8% 22.1 → 62.8 dB, +8% 52.0 →
59.5 dB (asymmetry gone; floors re-pinned 12 → 45 dB); tone-pair +8%
47.3 → 62.1 dB, −8% unchanged. Splice cadence halved (pinned by unit
test). Full suite, A/B matrix, ride/seam, WCET, robustness, soak green.
**Blind owner listens** (sealed keys, same excerpts as Stage 16):
- Old vs new (6 conditions): new won or tied ALL — every "robot" rating
landed on the old cadence.
- Exit listen, new vs Rubber Band (6 conditions): RB still cleanest on
all six, but the granulation vocabulary collapsed (one "very subtle
robot" across the set, vs Stage 16's "roboty bad quality/awful").
The residual complaints are a DIFFERENT artifact class: "bass
sometimes out of key" on 3/6 (±8%, bass-forward msbwy) — the
sub-120 Hz pitch-follow scope line (±1.3 semitones against the
corrected highs), audible now that granulation no longer masks it.
Owner decision: stage closed as achieved; the bass finding is
recorded against the scope line (ROADMAP Architecture note +
Not a Priority Yet) for any future re-litigation — a time-domain
low-band corrector was never falsified. Watch items recorded: msbwy
"drums bitcrushed/smear a tiny bit" (transient gates green; may be
relative-to-RB judgment) and an ours-narrow/RB-wide stereo note on
cold_heart −4% that reverses Stage 16's reading — recheck during the
Stage 14 listen.
**Lessons**:
- Fixing the loudest artifact re-litigates the ones it masked: the
bass-detune scope line was inaudible under granulation and surfaced
blind the moment the splices got clean. Budget for the next layer
when closing a masking artifact.
- The A/B matrix caught the ride-pitch interaction and the independent
review caught the write-head collision — neither appeared in the
prototype's evidence because sines without onsets never block a
splice and never ride. Synthetic evidence validates the mechanism;
gates and adversarial review validate the envelope.
- A physical headroom bound beats a behavioral heuristic: the taper,
the force cap, and the construction asserts all derive from the same
560-frame lag geometry, which is why the mechanism ships with no
tuning knobs.
## Stage 14 — Wide-Path Consolidation (closed 2026-08-13, superseded by Stage 19)
The consolidation (PRs #40/#41, 2026-08-07) delivered its mechanical
goals — offline wide ratios through the shipped `WideKeylockStage`,
wide-rate streaming/offline determinism, the Stage 13 sub-bass
attenuation gone, M/S corrected-path stereo, dead-code/doc sweep — and
then FAILED its owner listen: blind ±30/±50 (8 conditions, sealed key,
pre-consolidation `887d854` vs main vs Rubber Band), the old per-channel
batch PV beat the consolidated render ~7/8.
**The attribution chain that followed (three blind sessions + probes,
prototype `proto/stage14-ablation`) is the stage's real yield:**
- **Width**: measured before judged — the M/S path reproduces the source
image within 0.1 dB side/mid; the batch PV MANUFACTURES ~16 dB of side
energy by per-channel decorrelation (R3 adds ~5 dB). The owner blind
preference went to the wider renders. Faithful-vs-flattering is now an
explicit design decision parked in Stage 19.
- **"Roboty/pulsing background noise"**: resets innocent (ablated, no
change blind); M/S innocent (ablated); shared PV code innocent
(current-code batch bit-identical to 887d854's, SER 293 dB); chunking
innocent (streaming direct-ratio holds 60.7–70.5 dB purity and
auditioned clean/BEST in all 3 blind conditions). **Guilty: the live
topology** — varispeed tempo prepass + PV stretch + post-resampler
transpose, i.e. the Stage 11 design itself. Its floor was accepted
against Rubber Band; the direct-ratio comparison shows it was
self-inflicted, not a PV limitation.
Lessons:
- **"Offline must equal live" begs the question of which one is
right.** The consolidation dragged offline down to the live floor in
the name of consistency; the first blind live-config-vs-batch-config
comparison (never run before — Stage 11 only ever compared against
Rubber Band) inverted the goal. Unify on the better configuration,
not the incumbent one.
- **An acceptance verdict is scoped to its comparison.** Stage 11's
"gap vs R3, shippable" was read for a year as "the wide path is as
good as we can make it"; it never tested the in-house alternative.
- **PV renders cannot be null-tested across configurations** (different
startup phase states never cancel — SER ≈ 0 dB between renders that
sound alike); purity probes and blind ears are the discriminators.
- Manufactured width (decorrelation) reads as "full/wide" and wins
blind preference over a faithful image — flattering beats faithful
until it is made a deliberate choice.
## Stage 19 — Direct-Ratio Wide Path (2026-08-14)
The Stage 14 attribution chain's fix, built falsification-first: the
phase vocoder OWNS the tempo axis for the WideKeylock profile, as the
graph's demand-inverting head (`WidePvHead`, PR #60) — no varispeed
prepass, no post-resampler. The Stage 11 topology is deleted.
**Kill experiment first** (branch `proto/stage19-dynamics`): instant
full-range ratio steps, log-slewed steps, and continuous rides all
click-free through the chunked direct-ratio PV (max adjacent diff
0.0251 vs the 0.0752 soak bound) with pitch constant at 440.0 Hz —
the PV owns tempo, so a rate gesture has no pitch axis to tear.
Stage 11's step-tearing was a transposition-axis + resampler-anchor
property, not a ratio-change property.
**Build-out findings, each caught by an existing gate:**
- Ride control-to-audio: buffering the raw toggle arm ahead of the PV
queued 1778 frames of stale audio past the gate; fixed structurally
with a source-side delay matching the PV's analysis lead, so both
arms' PRODUCTION is contemporaneous while content stays aligned.
- Tail-flush starvation: both offline and the determinism harness
padded by `latency × rate` — now zero, since the analysis window is
source-side LOOKAHEAD (tape-like semantics; first delivered frame is
source frame 0, and the feared ratio-dependent latency dissolved).
The head lookahead joined the flush; wide determinism is
sample-identical again.
- **Mirror-warmup phase corruption**: seeding the OLA warmup from
mirrored content leaves per-bin phase offsets that persist in the
accumulators and partially cancel sub-bass (two-tone balance 2.47 vs
ideal 0.54 at rate 2.0) — and this is the SAME mirror-padding flaw
behind the pre-Stage-14 batch path's pinned sub-bass imbalance,
latent for a year. Re-seeding phases at the last warmup window
(mostly real content) restores the ideal at every rate; pinned by a
head-level two-tone test.
**Blind exit listen (2026-08-14, 8 conditions × 4 arms — the first
session through the new ab-tui, results parsed from its results.json):**
the roboty floor is GONE from every slowdown ("really nice / good bass
/ more open" vs the old arm's "roboty / underwater / low quality
artifacts"); at +50% compression the new head TIES Rubber Band (both
"slightly roboty") and only the decorrelated batch arm escapes.
Measured sub-bass balance at compression: the new head sits at the
ideal 0.537–0.538 across 50–100 Hz fundamentals — better than batch's
0.58–0.69 — so the +50% residual is the recurring width preference
(decorrelation masks artifacts), not a defect.
Lessons:
- A demand-inverting head is the right seam for "who owns the tempo
axis": the graph's feed loop, timeline, priming, and retarget
bookkeeping all carried over by matching the varispeed head's
interface.
- Silent str.replace no-ops are how a "fix" doesn't ship: an anchored
patch that missed after rustfmt reformatting printed success and
cost a debugging cycle — verify the marker landed, or use exact-match
editing that fails loudly.
- The same defect can hide in two places for different reasons: the
mirror-pad phase flaw shipped in the batch path (pinned as a
"trait") and nearly shipped again in the head's warmup. When a fix
explains an OLD pinned number, re-derive the old pin.
## Stage 10 — General-Purpose Beat Tracking and BPM Detection (2026-08-18)
The longest-running stage (opened before the engine rebuild finished;
closed as the roadmap's final act). What shipped, in order:
- Tempogram + DP tracker, tempo segments and downbeats in the artifact,
beat-level metrics in CI, desktop grid overlay (pre-review).
- Rigid kick-band grids for quantized material (v0.10.0: beat F 71.5% →
93.8%), then tracked-beat corroboration for the syncopated
non-adopters (2026-08-07: two of three adopt with sub-ms offsets;
Somebody To Love measured as genuine estimator disagreement).
- Honest low-confidence display (PR #44 + review fixes): estimator
disagreement caps the ARTIFACT confidence via an explicit
`phase_untrusted` verdict; desktop dims below 0.6. Owner-verified on
real material 2026-08-18.
- QM Vamp baseline column (PR #50): output-only external reference —
we beat QM on every confidently-gridded EDM row.
- Non-EDM corpus (PRs #63/#64): hip-hop ×2, tempo-conformed rock, live
James Brown (owner library, hash-locked), plus two CC drum & bass
rows in the PUBLIC corpus with acc1/acc2 ≥ 90 floors enforced in CI.
- **Metrical-level second pass (v12)**: the corpus exposed DnB locking
the 2/3 tempo level. Measured separation (3/2-candidate salience
0.76–0.82 on true-higher-level rows vs ≤ 0.60 elsewhere) drove a
threshold + re-track-with-shifted-prior + convergence-guard design.
Both DnB rows EXACT (174.00/170.00), zero changes elsewhere — and
the QM reference reads the same rows at 111.9/113.0, so the tracker
now resolves a class the academic baseline does not.
**Owner ear session (2026-08-18, the roadmap's final gate)**:
annotation click renders on the beat for in-da-club, california-love,
and smells-like-teen-spirit ("everything seems pretty spot on"); the
desktop honest low-confidence display confirmed. With verified
annotations, the hip-hop beat-PHASE class (our tracker AND QM both
score ~0 against ground truth) is a documented open frontier, gated by
the corpus rows for whenever it is re-attacked.
Lessons:
- An evidence half is not bureaucracy: within days of landing, the
non-EDM corpus surfaced two real detector classes (DnB metrical
level, hip-hop phase) that two years of EDM-only evidence never
could.
- Measure the separation before picking the threshold: the 0.70
metrical gate was read off a measured 0.60→0.76 gap across the whole
corpus, not tuned until the failing rows passed.
- A genre folder label is not ground truth: the "live drummer" rock
pick turned out to be a tempo-conformed pool edit — which made it a
BETTER corpus row (non-EDM rigid case) than the one it was picked
to be.
- External references cut both ways: the QM column first corroborated
our honest-uncertainty verdicts, then certified a genuine win when
we out-resolved it on DnB.
## Stage 20 — Bounded Width Treatment (2026-08-19, killed)
The one-day stage: promoted from Not-a-Priority-Yet by owner request,
killed by its own kill experiment before any build-out. The question —
can a bounded, mono-safe side injection (velvet-decorrelated,
high-passed corrected mid, mixed in at the M/S decode seam) reproduce
the recurring blind preference for the decorrelated batch render at
matched side energy?
Prototype `cf34fad`: env-gated `TIMESTRETCH_PROTO_WIDTH`, mono-exact
(cancels in L+R), calibrated by measurement — gain 0.4 ≈ +5 dB side/mid
(Rubber Band's measured level), 1.6 ≈ +15 dB (the batch arm's). The
blind set matched injection arms to reference side levels, isolating
decorrelation CHARACTER as the only variable. `ab.sh` gained
`--env-arm` for env-parameterized current-tree arms (kept; the proto
DSP is removed).
**Blind verdict (8 conditions × 5 arms, sealed key):** at batch-matched
+15 dB the injection reads "underwater, smearing, robotic" in 7/8
conditions; at +5 dB it only trades minor flaws with the shipped
faithful path. Meanwhile the shipped Stage 19 head tied or beat the
`887d854` batch arm in most conditions — including winning MSBWY +50%
outright, previously the batch arm's showcase — and Rubber Band was the
session's most consistent arm.
Lessons:
- **Side level is not width character.** Per-channel PV decorrelation
yields two independently COHERENT renders; a diffuse mid-derived
injection at the same side energy smears transients and reads
underwater. Energy-matching falsified the cheap mechanism cleanly —
exactly what the kill-first pattern is for (cost: one day, ~90 lines,
zero shipped surface).
- **Re-establish the preference before treating it.** The width
preference was measured against the pre-Stage-19 head; the Stage 19
quality gains removed most of the masking advantage that drove it.
An owner-taste finding is scoped to the quality floor it was heard
against — like acceptance verdicts, preferences expire when the
comparison changes.
- If width is ever re-attacked: start from coherent-channel processing
(true per-channel blend at double PV cost), and only after a fresh
blind session shows the preference still exists against the current
head.
## Stage 21 — Corrected Low Band (2026-08-19/20, achieved)
The scope line that fell: since Stage 2, the keylock chain's sub-120 Hz
band deliberately pitch-followed tempo — but that verdict rejected a
VOCODER bass, and the Stage 18 exit listen heard the detuned bass blind
("bass out of key" at ±8%) once splice granulation stopped masking it.
A time-domain SOLA-class corrector was the never-run falsifier.
**Kill experiment** (proto `cf34fad`, one day): env-gated ring reader
at the transposition rate, period-length NCC-aligned jumps, long
raised-cosine fades. Blind ±8% (4 conditions × 3 arms): corrected bass
won ALL FOUR — the detuned bass read as the artifact ("bassline sucks,
distorted, hum noise"), the corrected read "bass hitting well".
**Build-out** (`dd8ca34` + `41f7ae7`): lockstep channel splicing,
flux-gated onset protection, budgeted incremental period sweep,
engagement ramp (pitch-follow below ~±1%, full correction by ±2%),
rest recentering, shared toggle/fade blend. Exit listen (8 conditions,
±8/±4): PASSED — detune vocabulary gone; at ±8% old read "bassline
hum, bad" vs new "good, clean".
Lessons:
- **A scope line is scoped to the mechanism that set it.** "Bass
correction sounds worse" meant "VOCODER bass correction sounds
worse" for four years. When re-litigating a closed decision, falsify
with the mechanism class the original verdict never tried.
- **The corridor geometry IS the design.** Period-quantized jumps
inside an asymmetric corridor (~120 frames below nominal, thousands
above) drove every hard bug: magnitude triggers ping-ponged, clamped
jumps broke alignment, forced splices bypassed onset protection, and
the corridor mean is an honest group-delay bias (~+0.4 period) that
no threshold tuning can remove under the latency contract.
- **Interlocking bugs mask each other; the review earns its keep on
exactly those.** The quiet detector's ripple bug (envelope τ shorter
than a bass period) was the only thing rescuing the engagement
ramp's dead zone, while inflating the corridor bias — three HIGH
findings, none visible in the passing test suite, found by tracing
arithmetic with concrete numbers before the exit listen.
- **Scale time constants to the band.** An envelope, correlation
window, protection window, or masked window tuned for the high band
is wrong by an order of magnitude for bass; every constant that
worked here was the high-band corrector's constant re-derived from
the period range, not copied.
## Stage 23 — Elastique Reference Corpus and Parity Criterion (2026-09-03, achieved)
The first stage of the Parity Track: put Elastique Pro in the corpus
so the gap is observed instead of inferred, and write the parity
criterion down. No DSP changes.
**Corpus.** Elastique has no CLI, but REAPER licenses the same zplane
engine as "élastique 3.3.3 Pro" and runs ReaScripts headlessly.
`scripts/render_elastique.py` + `scripts/reaper_elastique.lua` (PR
#81, `f95c70f`) render the whole manifest at ±4/±8/±30/±50 % with no
window interaction: 19 tracks, 167/167 renders, ~10–30 s each, 32-bit
float at the source rate. The unity render is sample-exact against
the source; at ±8 % Elastique's timeline sits 12–33 ms from ours at a
given point (inherent transient relocation, same order as Rubber
Band). 32 references for the four WAV-source bpm-corpus tracks are in
`benchmarks/manifest.toml`; `reference_quality` gained a `per_engine`
summary (60 s window: spectral 0.917, flux 0.818 vs élastique Pro) and
`scripts/ab.sh --ref-arm` imports the full-track renders into blind
sets. Ableton Complex Pro (same engine) is the documented manual
fallback.
**Baseline session** (blind, sealed keys, owner, 2026-09-03; renders
from `f95c70f`; `target/ab/stage23-dj/results.json` and
`target/ab/stage23-wide/results.json`): Stage 16 excerpts (hot_stuff
60 s, msbwy 90 s, cold_heart 45 s) × 4 rates × 3 arms (ours / Rubber
Band R3 / Elastique Pro) per set, 24 conditions total. Rankings read
from the per-arm notes (no winner key was recorded):
- **DJ window (±4/±8 %).** Ours ranked below Elastique in 9 of 12
conditions; level with it in 3 (hot_stuff +4 "great" ×3; msbwy +8
"drums attacking harder, still clean" vs Elastique "tiny bit
fuzzy"; hot_stuff +8 mild). Rubber Band was the cleanest arm in 7,
Elastique in 3, tied in 2. Elastique was never described below both
others.
- **Wide (±30/±50 %).** Ours below Elastique in 8 of 12; level or
ahead in 4 — all at +50 % or −50 %: msbwy +50 (ours "good, clean";
Elastique "bassline a bit out of key"), cold_heart +50 (ours "nice,
clean"; Elastique "slightly wobbly"; Rubber Band "a bit narrow"),
msbwy −50 and hot_stuff −50 (three-way trade of metallic / crushed).
Rubber Band cleanest in 8, Elastique in 3, tie in 1. Consistent with
Stage 19: the direct-ratio head competes at large compression.
**Ranked artifact classes on our arm, owner's vocabulary:**
1. **Drums smearing / inconsistent / attack altered** — cold_heart −4
and −8 ("drums are smearing and inconsistent, something is
wobbly"), msbwy −4/+8 ("drums seem to hit harder"), hot_stuff +8
("kicks feel a tiny bit reduced"), hot_stuff −50 ("drums are
spraying"). The splice class; the Keylock chain's signature.
2. **Bass out of key / robotic bassline** — msbwy −4/−8 in the DJ
window (the Stage 21 corrector is engaged at these rates and the
verdict is still "out of key"); msbwy ±30, cold_heart −30/−50 on
the wide path ("wobbly bass, out of key, not pleasant"; "out of
key, robotic bassline"). On the wide path this is PV low-band
coherence, Stage 24's subject.
3. **Robotic / wobbly tonal elements** — cold_heart +4/+8 ("slightly
robotic", "a bit robotic or wobbly"), hot_stuff +30/+50/−30
("vocal … wobbly / robotic"). The "robotic" word appeared on our
arm in 3 DJ-window conditions: the criterion's automatic fail.
4. **Fuzzy / micro artifacts / bitcrushed texture** — msbwy +4,
hot_stuff −4, msbwy −30.
5. **Metallic** — msbwy −50, hot_stuff −50.
6. **Narrow / closed image** — cold_heart −4, hot_stuff −8.
Elastique's own classes, for the record: drums "bitcrushed / crushed"
at wide slowdowns (msbwy −50, hot_stuff −30/−50, cold_heart −30),
"tiny bit fuzzy" at msbwy +8, bass "a bit out of key" at msbwy +50,
kicks "smearing a tiny bit" at cold_heart −50. Rubber Band's: "a bit
narrow / closed" (cold_heart +50/−8, hot_stuff −30), "drums a bit off"
(msbwy −4), "vocal a bit metallic" (cold_heart −50).
**Parity criterion (finalised, in ROADMAP Definition of Success):**
two sealed-key sets of 12 conditions (DJ window and wide, the Stage 16
excerpts, three arms), two listeners; ours ranked below Elastique in
no more than 3 of 12 per set, never with "robotic / underwater /
vocoder" vocabulary; ties count as parity. Baseline against that bar:
DJ window 9/12 below with "robotic" present (fail); wide 8/12 below
(fail). The bar is Elastique, not Rubber Band, even though Rubber Band
was the cleanest arm overall: Rubber Band is a 2048-frame offline-class
render in these sets and remains the citable ceiling.
Lessons:
- **The reference you cannot script is the reference you never
measure.** The Elastique gap was "inferred from architecture" for a
year because the only host in mind was a DAW export. A second host
with the same licensed engine turned a manual chore into a
ten-minute batch.
- **Sample-exact at unity is the alignment test that matters for a
reference render.** Rate-dependent offsets at ±8 % looked like an
import bug until unity showed 0 samples; the offset is the engine's
transient relocation and no import step should "fix" it.
- **Our +50 % competitiveness is real and repeatable** (Stage 19, now
three-arm): the direct-ratio head is not the problem at large
compression. Slowdowns and the DJ window are, and those are the
decomposition's (Stage 25) and the low-band coherence's (Stage 24)
targets in that order.
## Stages 25 and 24 — Prototype Kill Listens (2026-10-08, all prototypes killed)
Two sealed-key owner sessions on the Stage 16 excerpts (msbwy 90 s,
hot_stuff 60 s, cold_heart 45 s), five arms each, notes per arm, no
winner picks. The "current" arm in both is the shipped engine at main
`2628090`, DSP-identical to the Stage 23 baseline renders (`f95c70f`;
no `src/` change between them).
**Stage 25, DJ window ±4/±8 %** (`target/ab/stage25-fullpv/results.json`;
arms current / fullpv / hy2 / Rubber Band / Elastique):
- **fullpv** (`9dbe45a`, `TIMESTRETCH_PROTO_FULLPV=1`: the shipped
direct-ratio wide head forced at DJ ratios) read robotic, underwater
or closed in 6 of 12 — "awful, under water, robot" (msbwy +4),
"muddly, robotic, under water" (msbwy −4), "closed, roboty"
(cold_heart +8). Clean on msbwy −8 and hot_stuff +8/−4. Killed: the
criterion forbids robotic vocabulary.
- **hy2** (`75b98ed`, two-path transient/tonal hybrid) was faulted in
8 of 12, and worst where Keylock is cleanest: hot_stuff −4/−8
"wobbly, roboty, bad" / "wobbly, underwater, bad", msbwy −8 "awful
artifacts in the low end". Killed under the Stage 25 rule.
- **hy3** (three-path) was never heard: `target/ab/stage25-hybrid` was
skipped once hy2 failed this badly, since hy3 adds a noise path to
the same transient/residual split. Dropped untested; if
decomposition is ever revisited, that set is the first listen.
- **current** was clean on all four hot_stuff conditions and most of
cold_heart. Its faults were msbwy at every rate ("kicks smearing",
"tiny bitcrushed on kicks, ultra robot parts" at +4, "bassline sounds
out of key" at −4, "bpm seems to speed up at sections" at +8) and
cold_heart −8 ("bassline is off or out of key, kicks smearing").
Elastique was heard "slight robot, under water" once (hot_stuff +8).
**Stage 24, wide ±30/±50 %** (`target/ab/stage24-peaktrack/results.json`;
arms current / trackband / all1024 / Rubber Band / Elastique;
prototype `a9d2680`):
- **trackband** (peak continuation + Bark lock strength) was
robotic/underwater/metallic in 5 of 12 — hot_stuff −50 "underwater,
awful", cold_heart −30 "pulsing roboty, metallic noise". It beat the
shipped head only at msbwy +30. Killed.
- **all1024** (all changes, 1024 short arm) was robotic/underwater/
wobbly in 5 of 12, with the bassline out of key twice. Killed — the
pre-listen purity probe (h15 67.7 → 37.5 dB at −50 %) predicted it.
- **current** was mostly "open, wide, clean". Below Elastique on msbwy
+30 and −50 (bassline "a tiny bit out" / "a bit out"), hot_stuff +30
(Elastique "the best"), cold_heart −50 ("slightly roboty,
baseline"); marginal at hot_stuff +50 (Elastique "cleanest"). Ahead
where Elastique turned metallic/bitcrushed (hot_stuff −30,
cold_heart −30, msbwy −30).
**Against the parity criterion:** DJ window ~4/12 below Elastique with
"robot" vocabulary on msbwy +4; wide 4–5/12 below with "roboty" on
cold_heart −50. Both still fail, but on the same engine the Stage 23
baseline counted 9/12 and 8/12.
Lessons:
- **A single session's below-Elastique count is noisy.** The same
engine scored 9/12 → ~4/12 (DJ) and 8/12 → 4–5/12 (wide) a month
apart. Arm count (five vs three), the competing prototypes'
failures, and listening context move the bar the shipped arm is
heard against. Read counts only within a session; the two-listener
rule in the criterion is the guard, and a parity sign-off should
re-hear the shipped arm in the same session, never compare to an
archived count.
- **The same wide head is robotic at ±4/±8 % and clean at ±30/±50 %.**
fullpv and current-in-the-wide-set are one head; only the ratio
differs. Unexplained. The pre-listen probe saw its 10 ms envelope
correlate only ~0.65 with Rubber Band at both −4 % and −30 %, so
missing onset guidance (Stage 23a) alone does not explain a
ratio-dependent verdict. Find the small-ratio mechanism before any
"make the DJ path spectral" proposal returns.
- **Bassline out of key is the recurring complaint on the shipped
engine in both windows** (msbwy at nearly every rate, cold_heart
−8/−50). On the DJ path the Stage 21 corrector is engaged at these
rates and the verdict persists; on the wide path it is PV low-band
coherence. It is now the most specific lead the listens give.
- **Measure-before-listen paid again.** all1024's purity collapse was
in `probes.txt` before rendering; the listen confirmed it.
## Stage 27 — Pitch-Shift Baseline Listen (2026-10-08, baseline only)
No DSP change: the first sealed-key session on pitch shifting, to set
the Stage 27 bar. Set `target/ab/stage27-pitch` (renders from
`stage27/pitch-refs` `3f843ac`, `src/` identical to main;
`results.json`, notes only): Josh Woodward "Anchor" (acoustic vocal)
and Brad Sucks "Out of It" (rock vocal) × ±3/±7 st × five arms — ours
(`pitch_shift()`, default Balanced envelope preset, so cepstral
correction at full strength at every shift), Rubber Band `--pitch
--formant`, and élastique Pro / Pro-formant / Soloist-mono.
- **Ours** was below the best formant-preserving reference in 7 of 8.
It was level only at Out of It −7 ("low, clean, slightly closed" vs
Pro-formant "a bit fuzzy"). Robotic or underwater wording in 4 of 8:
Anchor +3 "tiny bit robotic", Anchor +7 "a tiny bit robot", Anchor −7
"slightly robot, metallic vocal", Out of It +7 "under water noises".
Downward shifts lost vocal identity even with correction on: "not
bad, but pitched down a lot" (Out of It −3), "vocal is a bit off"
(Anchor −3).
- **Rubber Band** was the cleanest arm in about 6 of 8; its one clear
miss was "muddled vocal" at Anchor −7.
- **Élastique Pro-formant** was "clean, open" on every Anchor
condition, but "tiny bit bitcrushed" / "a bit bitcrushed, baseline
sounds a bit out" / "a bit fuzzy" on Out of It. It is the bar on
acoustic material and beatable on dense rock.
- **Élastique Pro** (no formant) read "chipmunk" / "pitched down a lot"
as a formant-off control should. **Soloist-mono** was "awful, 8-bit"
or "roboty, metallic" on all 8. It is a monophonic mode, the wrong
tool for full mixes, so drop it from future sets.
Against the parity criterion this is a clear fail (7/8 below, robot
vocabulary in half).
Lessons:
- **The robot sound is not one engine path's problem.** `pitch_shift`
stretches by the pitch factor and resamples, so ±3 st runs through
Keylock (ratios 0.84/1.19) and ±7 st through the wide head
(0.67/1.50). Robot notes landed on both. The step common to both,
per-channel cepstral envelope correction after resampling, is the
first suspect to isolate with an envelope-off arm.
- **Full-strength correction did not preserve identity downward.**
The Balanced preset applies it at every factor (only the Vocal preset
mutes it below 0.8×), and −3 st still read "pitched down". Cepstral
correction on a full mix is not yet doing the job Pro-formant and
Rubber Band's formant mode do.
- **Pick reference modes that fit the material.** Soloist-mono cost a
fifth of every condition to learn what its name says.