The emotion quick-pickers added in 1.20.5 guarded with
`typeof REH_EMOTIONS === 'undefined'`, but REH_EMOTIONS is a const declared
later in the bundle's single shared scope — `typeof` on a const in its
temporal dead zone throws instead of returning "undefined", which aborted
top-level initialization for every module bundled after tts-preview.js.
The pickers now read window.REH_EMOTIONS on a deferred macrotask.
Also: emotion instructions are now always built in English (spoken text and
the native-accent clause stay in the book's language), which controlled A/B
testing showed produces a far cleaner prosodic gradient from Qwen3-TTS; and
Fish-Speech now receives temperature/top_p/repetition_penalty, which it was
the only backend never to have forwarded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fish-Speech emotion tags were silently ignored on non-English books: per-line
emotions are LLM-generated in the book's own language, but Fish-Speech only
recognizes English [tag] markers, and a double-tagging bug was stacking a
broken server-derived tag on top of the client's own. Added a DE->EN
translation table and removed the double-tagging. Also wires the existing
book-profile context and race_species field into character portrait prompts
(previously only used for voice design), adds a recast-until-threshold loop
for casting, and adds backend-aware emotion quick-picks to Read Aloud, Try a
Voice, and Conversation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Voice consistency:
- Read back each voice's pinned seed (Seed Finder / Batch Seeds) on every
generation. The seed was saved to voice metadata but only ever read by the
Seed Finder's own benchmark path, so all per-voice seed pinning was inert.
- Stop coercing the "voice_design_playback" stability profile back to
"voice_clone". The pseudo-backend key isn't a real routing target, so the
backend-name normalizer silently rewrote it — reintroducing the hardcoded
seed:0 that profile exists to avoid, overriding every per-voice pin.
- Apply the accent clause on every line, not just at voice-creation time,
and reorder the instruct so emotion leads and accent trails (Qwen3-TTS
doesn't reliably follow multiple conflicting instructions).
- Pass an explicit language to Voice Design instead of leaving it on "Auto".
Audio effects:
- Add a limiter after compressor makeup gain. Makeup gain pushed peaks to
~1.9, and the final hard clip turned that into broadband distortion that
swamped the rest of the chain.
- Cascade highpass/lowpass 3 stages each (~18 dB/octave). Single-pole
filters were too gentle to band-limit speech audibly.
- Add a Bandpass control and wire it into the Telephone/Radio presets —
compression alone never sounded like a phone; band-limiting is the
defining trait.
Persona / Try It Out:
- Disable "Apply character persona" with an explanatory tooltip when the
voice has no persona saved, and error clearly server-side instead of
silently no-op'ing. Persona is typed manually per voice, never auto-filled.
- Stop dropping applyPersona in the chunked generation path (>200 chars).
- Populate the Voice Design dropdown from the user's own library rather than
filtering the engine's discovery list, which never contains custom voices.
Navigation and library:
- Use pushState instead of replaceState so browser Back/Forward step through
in-app navigation instead of leaving the app entirely.
- Show real dialogue line counts in the character sidebar instead of the
capped reference-quote count (which showed a misleading uniform "12").
Also fixes a crash in /api/transcribe-bytes that referenced an undefined
source_id in its cleanup path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Introduces the new Studio section (Source -> Characters -> Voices ->
Perform & Export) that reuses the existing Read Aloud/Library/Script
Rehearsal code via DOM reparenting instead of duplicating it, and rolls up
a long tail of bugs found while producing a real audiobook through it:
umlaut-eating name sanitizers, a voice picker that mispositioned itself and
capped results at 60, PDF pagination silently breaking on trimmed \f
markers, a race letting stale audio keep playing after a new line was
clicked, an alias-overlap bug that could silently redirect a voice/image
save onto the wrong character, voice design failing outright during brief
TTS backend restarts instead of retrying, sparse cast entries defaulting to
English/wrong gender, and a reassigned voice never reaching an already-open
Stage session or invalidating its cached audio. Also adds a persistent
per-line audio cache, audiobook export browsing/download, and an inline
voice-design prompt editor. Full details in CHANGELOG.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
