NewAmp 1.5.2 — Milkdrop fixed + production hardened

Long autonomous run resolving live-use bug reports plus a complete visualizer reactivity overhaul, deck art improvements, smarter Mixes scoring, in-app navigation, and a new psychedelic visualizer.

Critical fixes verified end-to-end

• Milkdrop / Butterchurn actually renders now. Root cause was the renderer CSP blocking the runtime shader compiler that butterchurn-presets uses. The catch swallowed the EvalError so the preset silently fell back to the placeholder. Added 'unsafe-eval' to script-src; the eval'd code only comes from the locally-bundled package, so connect-src still restricts external fetches. Verified with a new end-to-end smoke that clicks Milkdrop, mounts the canvas, and asserts no CSP/eval errors fire.
• Long-session slowdown — engine's RAF tick was notifying state listeners 60×/sec, re-rendering the 1900-line NowPlayingView on every frame. Throttled to 10Hz integer buckets (seek + duration still fire immediately). 6× reduction in per-second React work.
• Volume slider on visualizer works. Was invisible (opacity:0 default) and the rotated input was getting clipped by the parent's overflow:hidden. Replaced with native appearance: slider-vertical + writing-mode: vertical-lr; default opacity 0.32 so the slider is findable. 30px hit region.

New

• Liquid Mercury visualizer — 12 metaball blobs that each couple to a distinct frequency band. Beat-driven attractor flips collapse and explode the cluster on every kick; bass drives a slow palette wheel rotation. Connection lines fuse touching blobs; center caustic flare on each beat.
• In-app navigation from Now Playing — clicking artist/album names jumps into Artists / Albums view instead of opening Wikipedia search. External Wikipedia search moved behind a small ↗ icon.
• Sonic Atlas region playback — pin any atlas point, pick 6/12/24/48 nearest tracks, then PLAY REGION or QUEUE NEXT. Click a cluster of similar-sounding music as a journey across sound space.
• Living Tags in Now Playing — DSL-derived tags show as chips in the liner notes panel (replacing the old static filler).
• First-visit onboarding cards — Discover, Mixes, Living Tags, and Sonic Atlas each show an inline explainer the first time you open them.
• Albums A-Z letter rail — vertical letter strip on Albums view (artist sort) for quick jump-to-letter scrolling.
• Window X-button setting — choose minimize-to-tray (default) or close-app from Settings.
• Spectral-art fallback — bottom transport bar falls back to a deterministic SVG cover when embedded art fails to load.
• Deck art pans on Jukebox + Retro TV so the full cover is visible.
• TV static overlay on the Retro TV deck.

Fixed

• Mixes seed coherence — both Harmonic Mix and Taste Match now gate candidates by audio-DNA cosine + genre + era + artist similarity before scoring. Seeding from Everclear no longer pulls Lykke Li and a wall of rap.
• Visualizer reactivity — tighter beat decay (0.76 → 0.5), new kick/beatEdge/flux features. Per-preset fixes for Galaxy/Radial/Tunnel/Orbital Rings/Tempo Pulse/Confetti/Burning Cloud/Plasma Grid/Neon Ribbons.
• Fullscreen visualizer top nav auto-hides — cursor near the top edge (≤110px) reveals it, idle for 1.4s hides it again.
• Wikipedia integration — Blood Orange and similar artist-alias acts now resolve. Added Api-User-Agent header, extra disambiguators, error swallowing only on individual lookups.
• Album rating no longer overlaps Play Album buttons — moved to its own full-width row.
• Rating a song no longer makes the album look rated — Library signal only shows averageScore when 3+ tracks (or ≥50%) are rated.
• Album random reshuffle uses XOR-mixed sort key so close Date.now() seeds produce visibly different orderings.
• Vintage Computer theme ink colors darkened to pass AA contrast against the beige panel.
• Folder view dropped the 42% height cap when no folder is selected — typical 800px windows now show ~25 folders instead of 7.
• Sidebar scrolls when the window is too short.

Files

• NewAmp Setup 1.5.2.exe — Windows NSIS installer (133 MB, signed)
• NewAmp Portable 1.5.2.exe — Windows portable single-file (118 MB, signed)
• NewAmp Linux 1.5.2 x64.tar.gz — Linux unpacked tarball (127 MB)