The intern reached 21 of 58 published transcripts as "Devin". The obvious fix —
seed his name in the Whisper initial prompt — only works for one of the two
transcription paths:
- backend/services/transcription.py (live show) uses mlx_whisper and does take
an initial_prompt. Added Devon there. This also picks up the Big Bend prompt
rewrite from the relocation work, which was sitting uncommitted.
- publish_episode.py, which actually produces the published transcripts, uses
LightningWhisperMLX, whose transcribe() signature is (audio_path, language).
It accepts no initial_prompt at all, so there is nothing to seed.
So the published path gets a deterministic correction pass instead:
fix_proper_nouns() rewrites known mishearings after transcription, preserving
casing (Devin/DEVIN/devin -> Devon/DEVON/devon) and matching whole words only,
so "Devinshire" is left alone. Verified against the real episode 58 transcript:
24 occurrences to 0, output byte-identical to the manual relabel in bf1afef.
Swapping the publish path to mlx_whisper would allow a real prompt, but that
changes the transcription engine for every episode and is a bigger call than
this warrants.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
add_episode_to_sitemap() was removed in the previous commit, so nothing was
writing the sitemap any more. Publishing now shells out to
generate_episode_pages.py --sitemap right after the transcript is copied into
website/transcripts/, which builds the new episode's static page and rebuilds
the sitemap from the feed.
Deliberately non-fatal: by this point the audio is live on Castopod and the RSS
feed has been rebuilt, so a generator failure must not abort the publish. It
warns and moves on, and the page lands on the next run. Covered for non-zero
exit, timeout, and a missing generator script.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A --resume run rebuilt the episode title from the Castopod URL slug, which is
lowercased and stripped of punctuation, so episode 58 went to YouTube as
"Episode 58: Rayfield S Nephew The Marfa Lights And Why Nobody Believes Concho"
with a placeholder description. save_chapters() only persisted chapters, so
resume had no real metadata to fall back on.
Metadata is now written to <audio>.metadata.json during a normal run and read
back on resume. If that file is missing (episodes published before this change)
the title and description are read from Castopod instead. Slug reconstruction
survives only as a last resort: it warns loudly, flags the result, and anchors
the episode prefix strip so it no longer eats the phrase mid-title.
Reading back from Castopod needed its own fix — TO_BASE64 wraps every 76 chars
and mysql renders those breaks as a literal backslash-n, which made b64decode
throw and the lookup silently return None.
Also includes two changes that were already sitting in the working tree: the
YouTube tag budget fix that episode 58's invalidTags failure prompted (with its
test), and a metadata model bump to claude-haiku-4.5.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Add real-time LLM/TTS cost tracking with live status bar display and post-show reports
- Fix PTT bug where Devon suggestion layout shift stopped recording via mouseleave
- Devon: facts-only during calls, full personality between calls
- Double WEIRD topic pool (109→203), bump weight to 14-25%
- Auto-generate YouTube thumbnails with bold hook text in publish pipeline
- LLM SEO: llms.txt, robots.txt for LLM crawlers, structured data, BreadcrumbList schemas
- Publish episode 37
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Massively expanded all 8 caller topic pools from ~1200 to ~2500 entries to
reduce repeat calls. Added persistent topic history (data/used_topics_history.json)
with 30-day aging to prevent cross-episode duplicates. Published episode 35.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Castopod password, DB password, BunnyCDN keys, Postiz JWT/IDs,
and monitoring token all moved to environment variables.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Whisper base → distil-large-v3 for much better live transcription accuracy
- Add context hints to transcription (caller name, screening status)
- Increase beam_size 3→5 for better decoding
- Add explicit role clarification in caller system prompt so LLM knows Luke is the host
- Prefix host messages with [Host Luke] in LLM conversation
- Fix upload_clips episode list sorting (natural numeric order)
- Episodes 26-28 transcripts, data updates, misc fixes
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Fix TTS text pipeline: new caps handling (spell out unknown acronyms, lowercase
emphasis words), action-word lookahead for parenthetical stripping, abbreviation
expansions (US→United States, NM→New Mexico), pronunciation fixes
- Inworld TTS: camelCase API fields, speakingRate per-voice overrides, retry logic
with exponential backoff (3 attempts)
- Footer redesign: SVG icons for social/podcast links across all pages
- Stats page: show "Rate us on Spotify" instead of "not public" placeholder
- New voices, expanded caller prompts and problem scenarios
- Social posting via Postiz, YouTube upload in publish pipeline
- Episode transcripts 15-25, terms page, sitemap updates
- Fix invoice script: match Timing totals using merged Task+App intervals
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Bypass flaky YouTube RSS ingestion by converting MP3+cover to MP4
and uploading via YouTube Data API. Videos are auto-added to the
podcast playlist. Includes yt_auth.py for token management.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- make_clips.py: Extract best moments from episodes as short-form clips
(9:16 vertical MP4 with captions for TikTok/Shorts/Reels)
- deploy_stats_cron.sh: Deploy podcast_stats.py to NAS as Docker container
running hourly with auto-restart
- podcast_stats.py: Add _find_ytdlp() for Docker compatibility, auto-detect
local Docker for Castopod DB queries
- publish_episode.py: Upgrade Whisper model from base to large-v3
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Returning callers now keep their voice across sessions (stored in regulars.json)
- Backfilled voice assignments for all 11 existing regulars
- Discord button on homepage + link in all page footers
- REC and On-Air buttons now toggle together (both directions)
- Fixed host mic double-stream bug (stem_mic vs host_stream conflict)
- SEO: JSON-LD structured data on episode + how-it-works pages
- SEO: noscript fallbacks, RSS links, twitter meta tags
- Episode 9 transcript and sitemap update
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Add podcast_stats.py with --json/--upload flags for BunnyCDN
- Add website/stats.html fetching stats from CDN
- Add stats CSS styles
- SEO: shorten title/description, add og:site_name, twitter cards,
theme-color, image dimensions, consistent favicons and cache-busting
- Add all episode transcript pages to sitemap.xml with lastmod
- Auto-add new episodes to sitemap in publish_episode.py
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Re-label all 8 episode transcripts with LUKE:/CALLER: speaker labels
using LLM-based diarization (relabel_transcripts.py)
- Add episode.html transcript page with styled speaker labels
- Update publish_episode.py to generate speaker-labeled transcripts
and copy to website/transcripts/ for Cloudflare Pages
- Add SVG favicon with PNG fallbacks
- Fix CPU issue: tie host audio stream to on-air toggle, not per-caller
- Update how-it-works page with post-production pipeline info
- Add transcript links to episode cards in app.js
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- On-air toggle uploads status.json to BunnyCDN + purges cache, website
polls it every 15s to show live ON AIR / OFF AIR badge
- Publish script downloads Castopod's copy of audio for CDN upload
(byte-exact match), removes broken slug fallback, syncs all episode
media to CDN after publishing
- Fix f-string syntax error in publish_episode.py (Python <3.12)
- Enable CORS on BunnyCDN pull zone for json files
- CDN URLs for website OG images, stem recorder bug fixes, LLM token
budget tweaks, session context in CLAUDE.md
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
New stem recording system captures 5 time-aligned WAV files (host, caller,
music, sfx, ads) during live shows. Standalone postprod.py processes stems
into broadcast-ready MP3 with gap removal, voice compression, music ducking,
and EBU R128 loudness normalization.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Music crossfade: smooth 3-second blend between tracks instead of hard stop/start
- Emotional detection: analyze host mood from recent messages so callers adapt tone
- AI caller summaries: generate call summaries with timestamps for show history
- Returning callers: persist regular callers across sessions with call history
- Session export: generate transcripts with speaker labels and chapter markers
- Caller screening: AI pre-screens phone callers to get name and topic while queued
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Remove gpt-4o-realtime (WebSocket-only) from OpenRouter models
- Increase OpenRouter timeout to 60s and max_tokens to 150
- Handle empty LLM responses
- Fix publish_episode.py for current Castopod API fields
- Add port conflict check and graceful shutdown to run.sh
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
lukeandClaude Opus 5