The app shuffled by flattening every album's meta.json in scope into one
array and choosing from it. On a hundred-thousand-track library that
meant a six-figure object array living in the phone's JS heap — marked
by every garbage collection — and copied again on each draw. Measured on
device: the JS thread never went idle during playback and the phone
reached 'serious' thermal state.
Picking twenty songs never required any of that. The manifest already
holds per-album track counts, so the choice is arithmetic over numbers
and only the albums actually picked are read.
Uniform over TRACKS, not albums: choosing an album first would make a
two-track EP as likely as a sixty-track box set, so albums are weighted
by count via a running total and a binary search. Same distribution as
shuffling everything and taking the first n, which is what a shuffle
means. Results are re-shuffled before returning, because grouping the
reads by album would otherwise hand back something sorted by album.
Measured, not guessed.
ffprobe is gone from the stream path. It ran on the first request for each
file — 50ms warm, 315ms cold on this machine, paid before the first byte, once
per file per sidecar restart — to fill X-Audio-Duration, a header nothing in
the web read and which duplicates the durationSec the indexer already wrote
into meta.json. Removed rather than cached harder: the fastest work is the work
not done, and a second copy of a number is a second thing that can disagree.
BREAKING for any client that read that header; read /meta instead, which every
client already fetches to build its queue.
/stream gains an ETag and Cache-Control. It was the only route with no
validator at all — cover, meta, lyrics and poster have had one all along — so
every seek and every replay re-read the file over the network. mtime+size
identifies the bytes, since a re-encode replaces the file. A Range request
never answers 304: that would answer a question about part of a file with a
statement about all of it, and players handle it badly.
And `?v=` makes covers cacheable rather than merely revalidatable. `no-cache`
means "ask before reusing", so a grid of forty albums cost forty conditional
requests on every load, all answering 304. The manifest already carries each
album's version, so passing it costs the client nothing — and the server then
answers `immutable`, making a repeat visit send nothing at all.
That last one is deliberately conditional on `v` being present, which keeps it
backward compatible: a client that has not been updated gets today's behaviour
and cannot end up holding a stale cover forever.
Everything the plugin is, moved out of officerdev/platform on 2026-08-15 —
41 files, unchanged from the tree they left.
manifest.ts identity, one permission, ffmpeg/ffprobe declared
api/ the sidecar proxy; the prefix comes from mountPrefix()
sidecar/ the whole /api/music contract — indexing, streaming, per-user state
db/ music_favorites, _playlists, _playlist_items, _now_playing
web/ panels, layout, and the player: engine, bar, lyrics, favourites
cliamp/ the second playback path, parked — not working, kept deliberately
widgets/ the dashboard widget, parked — plugins cannot contribute widgets
assets/ icon.png, the dock tile
scripts/ the reindex CLI
PLUGIN.md is the design record: what moved, what stayed, what broke, and why.
MUSIC_API.md is the contract the phone and tablet apps speak, and the reason
the sidecar's HTTP shape is not free to change.
── It does not build here, and that is the point ──
The platform resolves `hooks/useClient`, `officerdev`, `officerdb/db` and `@@/*`
through the workspace links in its own node_modules. Measured from this
directory, outside the platform checkout, every one of them fails to resolve —
7 imports in the backend, ~29 in the frontend.
So this repository is the source of truth, not yet a buildable unit. Making it
one means the host API becoming something a plugin can depend on rather than
something it reaches into. That is the next problem, and having the code here
is what makes it unavoidable rather than theoretical.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhas
officer