memory: donut onyx-58 multi-clip ref reverted; emotion-away-from-clone lesson

A/B (5 pinned-seed neutral pairs) showed original single-clip seg000
(16.3s) beats the 52s 4-take concat on timbre fidelity — reverted live +
build-source to seg000-alone. Recorded two craft lessons: more reference
audio is not automatically better when takes vary; emotion steering pulls
output away from a cloned voice fast (keep clones emotion-neutral).

persistent-memory.md

@@ -113,7 +113,7 @@ _As of 2026-08-02 — **session at a natural close; nothing infra-ops-side block
 - **mimir-inbox DEPLOYED + verified on corviduo-dev `10.250.50.152:8091`** (#377 browser-facing half; write+read proven end to end). Live commit `8ece117` (3 redeploys); co-located per the operator's reversed-to-CO-LOCATE ruling. auto-memory `reference_mimir_inbox_deploy`.
 - **#377 read path fully working** — P&P ingested + queryable via Mimir on personal :8081. Chased through worldtree-dev bugs **#380** (wing-blind index → concepts in wrong collection; fixed b164 + one-shot `--reindex <job_id>`), **#381** (stale Chroma client → **restart `worldtree-personal-worldtree-api-1` after any ingest/re-index** until their fix), **#382** (intermittent Mimir grounding / silent training-substitution; fixed b166 = `_index.md` per wing job-dir + a prompt rule; **verified 3/3** by ratatoskr-dev). DCC re-file SETTLED = **no** (prompt rule grounds it; `_index.md` rides next re-ingest).
 - **muninn-gate → muninn-dispatch 0.1.5** (rebuilt off `vh/muninn-gate` `bc04c4c`, image 0.0.14; serves `concept_schema`/`concept_schema_source`). BuildKit gitea secret; recreate w/ `compose up -d` not bare restart.
-- **donut voice** cloned from the **65-frost Booth bundle** → registered in the Zonos gateway (`voice:"donut"`, live in the Asset Engine TTS-zoo make form; auditioned in booth `donut-voice`). **Expanded 2026-08-02 with the `onyx-58` Booth bundle** (`dataset-467d2cf8d91141a4-curated.zip`): reference grew from seg000-alone (16.3s) → **seg000 + onyx-58 seg101/seg110/seg148 = 52.0s @ 44.1kHz mono s16**. NOTE: onyx-58 `seg148` diarized as SPEAKER_03 but is Donut (operator-confirmed misdiarization) — same-speaker, included. Old ref backed up `irv-ml1:~/Donut.wav.pre-onyx58`. A/B audition booth `donut-onyx58`. Zonos `/v1/audio/speech` already streams (chunked, TTFB ~0.44s) — ratatoskr shipped the client-side chunk-passthrough for play-as-it-arrives; **no gateway change was needed**.
+- **donut voice** cloned from the **65-frost Booth bundle** → registered in the Zonos gateway (`voice:"donut"`, live in the Asset Engine TTS-zoo make form; auditioned in booth `donut-voice`). **onyx-58 expansion TRIED → REVERTED 2026-08-02:** folded the `onyx-58` bundle (seg101/seg110/seg148, all Donut — `seg148` was diarized SPEAKER_03 but operator-confirmed misdiarize) in alongside seg000 → 52.0s multi-clip ref, but a pinned-seed **neutral/no-emotion** A/B (5 pairs, booth `donut-onyx58`) showed the **single-clip seg000 (16.3s) wins on timbre fidelity** — the 4-take concat muddied the speaker embedding. **LIVE = seg000-alone** (reverted both live bind-mount + build-source tree; old ref was at `irv-ml1:~/Donut.wav.pre-onyx58`). See Tried-and-abandoned for the emotion-fidelity lesson. Zonos `/v1/audio/speech` already streams (chunked, TTFB ~0.44s) — ratatoskr shipped the client-side chunk-passthrough for play-as-it-arrives; **no gateway change was needed**.
 
 **Open follow-ups (non-blocking — pick one up or not):**
 - **Zonos emotion:** sad axes/text pass on the 3 calibrated voices (only named-sad, untested); emotion-congruent-text pass (validates intensity, may rescue sad id); clone-char (Emmie/Penny/Natalie/Miranda) emotion rows use the mid-region fallback until measured. Presets are **provisional** (neutral-text ear-check was inconclusive). Tools `~/development/zonos-tools/{axes_sweep,strength_ladder,gen_auditions,dial-in-studio,assemble_voice}.py` (run ON irv-ml1; dial-in studio = nohup :8898 on nh3-dev). dvalin thread at rest (`01KXT12FN0AS…`). → `persistent-memory.d/2026-07-18-zonos-gateway-0.2.1-emotion-presets.md`
@@ -262,6 +262,8 @@ _147 older entries archived to archival-memory.md._
 
 ## Tried and abandoned
 
+- `[2026-08-02]` **donut voice multi-clip reference (onyx-58 expansion) — TRIED, REVERTED.** Folded the `onyx-58` bundle's 3 Donut clips (seg101/seg110/seg148) in alongside the original seg000 → a 52.0s 4-take concat reference, hoping a longer ref → more robust speaker embedding. A pinned-seed A/B (5 pairs, varied registers, booth `donut-onyx58`) showed the **original single-clip seg000 (16.3s) sounds better** — concatenating disparate takes muddied the timbre more than the extra range helped. Reverted to seg000-alone (live + build-source). **Two durable lessons:** (1) for a faithful clone, a single clean representative take can beat a longer multi-take concat — more reference audio is NOT automatically better when the takes vary. (2) **Emotion steering pulls the output AWAY from the cloned voice fast** (operator's craft rule) — keep donut (and clones) emotion-neutral for fidelity; the gateway only enables emotion when an `emotion_*`/`preset` dial is explicitly sent, so bare `{input,voice}` calls stay pure-clone. `seg148` was diarized SPEAKER_03 but IS Donut (operator-confirmed misdiarize). onyx-58 curated bundle lives in booth `onyx-58` (24h TTL — stash to `/mnt/smithy/voice_clones/` if a future middle-ref experiment is wanted).
+
 - `[2026-08-02]` **Verifying the INDEX is not verifying GROUNDING** (#382). A `search_library` returning wing=fiction hits proves the content is *retrievable*; it does NOT prove the agent (Mimir) *trusts and uses* those hits vs. silently answering from training. I reported "Mimir read Austen back to you" off a grounded-*looking* answer; ratatoskr-dev caught that grounding was intermittent (some sessions discarded the correct hits and substituted training knowledge). Test the harder claim — are the citations note-extracted or model-knowledge? — and reading the DEPLOYED artifact beats trusting the test for "is the fix live."
 
 - `[2026-07-30]` **brokkr's WebSearch "verification" CONFIRMED a hallucination — 3 phantom `microsoft/Mage-Flow-{Base,Turbo,Edit}` repo IDs.** brokkr-smithy-dev handed 3 gated-looking repo IDs for an operator-directed model pull; they don't exist (its own web-search fabricated an arXiv ID + project page, twice). Lesson: the HF **registry API is ground truth** — an unauth 401 ≠ exists (`{"error":"Invalid username or password"}` masks private/gated/nonexistent alike), an authed 404 = phantom, and `author=X&search=Y` refutes existence. API-verify every repo ID before a pull; LLM-summarized web fetches confabulate. auto-memory `reference_verify_hf_repo_ids_before_pull`.