pop — media & raw-asset management #

The question this answers: where do a track's media files (final mix, instrumental bed, raw vocal stems, caches) live so we can work across machines, reproduce stems from the repo later, and never re-pay for something we already generated.

the principle: code is source, media is backup #

pop/ is bottom-up (SCORE.md). Almost every asset is reproducible at $0 from the repo:

• synths (skrill / hoover / zitar / supersaw / sinepower) and the bed builders (bin/render.mjs, recap/bin/trance.mjs) are pure code. Re-running them reproduces the bed bit-for-bit.

The only asset that is not free to regenerate is the ElevenLabs jeffrey-pvc vocal — say.mjs bills real money. It is content-hash cached locally (<stem>.mp3 + <stem>.mp3.hash), so a second render on the same machine is free. The job of the asset system is to make that cache — and the finished media — survive across machines and time.

So:

where media lives #

The AC assets system is DigitalOcean Spaces (s3://assets-aesthetic-computer) mirrored to the gitignored system/public/assets/ tree (same system papers and the trancenwaltz single already use). pop media lives under a structured per-track path:

system/public/assets/pop/<lane>/<slug>/
  <slug>.mp3                 # final mix — the deliverable
  bed.mp3                    # instrumental bed (cheap, kept for convenience)
  vocal/
    <slug>-vocal.mp3         # RAW jeffrey-pvc stem  ── billable original
    <slug>-vocal.mp3.hash    # say.mjs cache key  ── restores = free re-render
    <slug>-vocal-words.json  # whisper word windows
    <slug>-vocal-words.json.hash
    <slug>-pitched-alignment.json

Intermediates (*-pitched.mp3, *-stretched.mp3, out/.tmp/) are not stored — they regenerate locally from the vocal stem in seconds.

the per-track process #

After a track is rendered + (optionally) sung:

# 1. render the bed (free, deterministic)
node pop/hippyhayzard/bin/render.mjs --mode song
# 2. (optional) sing it — bills ONCE, then cached
node pop/hippyhayzard/bin/sing.mjs
# 3. stage durable media into the assets tree
node pop/bin/archive.mjs hippyhayzard hippyhayzard
# 4. back up to Spaces (syncs ONLY system/public/assets/pop)
npm run pop:assets:up

On another machine (or later, fresh checkout):

git pull
npm run pop:assets:down          # restores beds, finals, vocal cache
node pop/hippyhayzard/bin/sing.mjs   # re-render is FREE — say cache hit

pop:assets:up / pop:assets:down sync only the system/public/assets/pop/ subtree (fast — not the whole multi-GB assets bucket), mirroring the same DO Spaces endpoint/flags as the repo-wide assets:sync.

pop/bin/archive.mjs <lane> <slug> is the per-track stager: it copies the lane's durable media (final, bed, vocal stem + hash + json) into system/public/assets/pop/<lane>/<slug>/ so step 4 has something to push. Re-runnable; never touches intermediates.

why this shape #

• git stays small — no binaries; pop/*/out/ is gitignored.
• cross-system — git pull + pop:assets:down reproduces a track, and any further sing.mjs is free because the billable vocal cache is restored alongside the audio.
• future stems — the raw vocal is preserved, so we can always re-mix, re-pitch, or pull a clean stem out of an old track without re-paying ElevenLabs or hoping a laptop still has the cache.
• the bucket is the backup, not git and not one machine's ~.