Nothing in Minstrel ever noticed a deleted file. The walk only visits
paths that exist, so a row whose file was gone was never scanned, never
errored, never counted — permanently invisible. classifyEvent ignores
fsnotify removals by design, and the safety-net scan is the same walk, so
it covers additions only. Rows accumulated forever.
Found on the operator's library: a completed scan reported
skipped=24185 errored=0 while the MBID backfill (which opens files by DB
path rather than walking) logged ~40 "no such file or directory" across
three reorganised albums. Those rows also kept their pre-#2499 welded
genre, which is how this surfaced — the version-stamped tag re-read can
only reach files the walk visits.
The harm is not cosmetic. tracks is the candidate universe for
recommendation.sql / discover.sql / system_mixes.sql and nothing filtered
on file existence, so a mix could spend a slot on a track that cannot
stream.
Marks rather than deletes. A missing file is a claim about the filesystem
and the filesystem lies transiently — an unmounted volume, a network
blip, a container that started before its media mount attached. Every
sweep in internal/gc resolves a truth INSIDE the database and is safe to
run blind; this one is not, so no deletion happens here. Three guards
refuse to act on ambiguous evidence: every scan root must resolve to a
non-empty directory, the walk must have seen at least one file, and one
reconcile may newly mark at most 25% of the library. Clearing a mark is
never the dangerous direction, so it runs unconditionally — otherwise a
library that tripped the cap could never recover once the mount returned.
Only a full Scan reconciles. The walk's set of seen paths is the
evidence, and ScanFiles has no basis for concluding anything about files
it did not look at.
Excludes marked tracks from all 13 track-emitting queries (radio x2,
system mixes x5, discover x4, most-played x2), the 6 play-history seed
picks, and the genre browse axis. Deliberately NOT filtered: the shared
ListPlaylistTracks read path, because it also serves user-curated
playlists where hiding a track the user added would be wrong — system
playlists shed orphans on their next daily rebuild instead. History and
the taste profile also keep them: those record the past, and a track you
played 200 times still says something about your taste.
Reconcile tallies land in scan_runs so a disappearance is visible rather
than discovered when a mix comes up short.
The 2-week metrics review found Discover beating the manual baseline on
skip rate — which for a discovery surface means it plays it safe. On a
single-user server it's effectively dormant + crude-random, and the
per-user taste profile (taste_profile_tags, #796) went unused (#1254 gap).
Add a fourth Discover candidate bucket, ListTasteUnheardTracksForDiscover:
unheard / non-liked / non-quarantined tracks ranked by summed taste-tag
weight over tracks.genre (split like the radio tag_overlap arm), md5
tiebreak. Its picks are stamped pick_kind = 'taste_unheard' (migration
0041 widens the CHECK on playlist_tracks + play_events, rule #36).
Rebalance the slot allocation 40/30/30 → taste_unheard 35 / dormant 30 /
cross_user 20 / random 15, and lead the interleave with taste_unheard so
a track shared with another bucket keeps the taste stamp and the
targeted-novelty arm stays measurable. Metrics label "Taste-matched" +
order entry added to the single server-side pickKindLabels map, so web
and Android surface the new breakdown row with no client change.
Cold start (empty taste_profile_tags) yields an empty taste bucket that
redistributes to the survivors, so Discover still fills.
Scribe #1488. Companion review outcomes: Songs-like starvation already
fixed (#1255); For You v2 ratified as-is (fresh-injection cost disproven).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The cross-user bucket query combined SELECT DISTINCT with ORDER BY md5(...),
which Postgres rejects at plan time (SQLSTATE 42P10). buildDiscoverCandidates
returned that error on first bucket failure, so the whole Discover playlist
was skipped every nightly run — even though the random bucket pool was
healthy. Switched to GROUP BY so the md5 ordering expression no longer needs
to appear in the select list, and hardened the function so future single-
bucket failures degrade gracefully via slot redistribution instead of taking
out the whole playlist.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds 'discover' as an accepted system_variant on the playlists
table — alongside 'for_you' and 'songs_like_artist' — and three
sqlc bucket queries that back the new playlist's daily candidate
selection.
The three buckets surface tracks the user hasn't played and
hasn't liked:
- Dormant artists: artists this user has played < 10 times total.
Surfaces the long tail of their library.
- Cross-user likes: tracks any OTHER user has liked but this one
hasn't engaged with. Empty on single-user servers; the Go-side
allocator redistributes the deficit across the other two
buckets.
- Random unheard: pure random sample as the safety net and the
cold-start fallback.
All three share exclusion filters: not-played by this user, not
liked by this user, not in lidarr_quarantine for this user. All
order by md5(track_id || dateStr) for daily determinism — same
pattern as the existing tieBreakHash logic in system.go.
LIMIT values are generous (80/60/200) so the per-album (<=2) /
per-artist (<=3) caps and slot redistribution in T2 have headroom.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bvandeusen
