The Video Directory

What it is for

One job above all others.

Re-uploading a session already on the channel is the failure that is genuinely unrecoverable. It is exactly what YouTube's inauthentic-content policy exists to catch, and no amount of good metadata undoes it. Human memory is not an adequate control across twenty videos a month for years — so the directory is.

Everything else it does (composing titles, tracking dates, suggesting what to shoot) exists to make that first job easy enough that you actually use it.

Your first video

Sixty seconds, start to finish.

1. Open the Compose tab.
2. Press Suggest the next video. It fills in a world, interval, length and sound that has never been used, avoids anything the last uploads already did, and picks a numeral look you have not shot recently.
3. Read the verdict panel. Green means new; red means you already published it.
4. Set a publish date, or leave it empty to decide later.
5. Press Planned.
6. When you shoot it, open it from the Planned list and press mark published. Copy the title, tags and description straight out of the panel while you upload.

That is the whole loop. Everything below is detail on the parts you will eventually want to control by hand.

The four axes

What makes a video a different video — and what emphatically does not.

The directory decides whether two videos are the same by building one canonical key out of four things. Change any one of them and it is a genuinely different video. Change anything else and it is the same video wearing a different coat.

The key is shown under every verdict and in every video's panel, so you can always see exactly why the directory thinks two things are the same:

seascape@sunset | 50-10 | 120m | ocean    ← light counts, Seascape only
mountain-cabin  | 50-10 | 120m | brown    ← no light slot; the theme is the look
                  ↑        ↑      ↑
              interval  runtime  sound

The runtime is the real length of the file. On /stage the final break is part of the session, so it is always blocks × (focus + break) — which is why a 50/10 lands exactly on the hour and can be titled "2-Hour" without lying.

Sound blends are sorted before they go into the key, so ocean+breeze and breeze+ocean can never key as two different videos.

The three buttons

Check asks a question. The other two make a commitment.

Check

Answers "is this video already in the directory, and where?" It never changes anything. Use it when you have an idea and want to know if you have already done it — it tells you whether the combination sits in planned or published, gives you its title, and shows its publish date.

Planned

Adds the video to the planned list: something you intend to shoot, but have not published. The date may be empty or in the future. Both buttons refuse to act while the verdict is red, so you cannot add a duplicate by accident.

Published

Adds it straight to the published list — for a video already uploaded to YouTube. If you have not set a date, it stamps today.

Dates decide state

The record must never disagree with the channel.

A publish date in the past means the video is already out, so it cannot be planned. Press Planned with a past date and it refuses and tells you why, rather than quietly correcting you.

• No date — fine for Planned. Published will stamp today.
• Future date — fine for either.
• Past date — Published only.

You can set or change the date later from inside any video's panel. Give a planned video a past date there and it moves itself to published; move a published video back to planned and its past date is cleared, because the two cannot both be true.

Dropping

Drop abandons a video without erasing it. It leaves the working lists, still appears under All videos, can be restored, and — unlike published — frees its combination again, so you could shoot that configuration later if you change your mind.

The four lists

Every video is in at least one of them, permanently.

Click any row to open its panel: full parameters, the numeral look it used, its axis key, its publish-date field, and copy-ready title, thumbnail text, tags and description.

The Reservoir tab answers "will we run out?" — it is the live count of what is left, gated by the same coherence rules the composer uses, so it counts only videos you could actually shoot. Tick lands on a round hour to see only the ones whose runtime is close enough to a whole hour to say so in the title.

Suggest the next video

The part that stands in for a strategist.

It scores every unused combination and fills the composer with the winner. Two things drive the score.

Measured search value. Noise leads, then rain, then scene sounds — brown noise is 1,722,596 searches a month and white 2,212,947, while ocean waves is 274,621 at a competition score of 62.5, which is real demand we cannot rank on. Round hours and the 90–245 minute band score higher because that is where the view medians actually sit.

Recency, on every axis. Anything a recent upload used costs points — sound most, then interval, then duration, then world. Without this it recommended twelve videos in a row that were all 25/5 with brown noise at two hours, differing only in the painted world, which is exactly the templated feel the theme cycle exists to prevent. Now twelve consecutive suggestions span twelve worlds, six intervals and five sound sets.

It is a recommendation, never a constraint. Change anything it picked.

Numerals

Tracked and varied on purpose — never counted.

These do not make a video distinct, and the directory will not let you pretend otherwise. They are tracked for a different reason: a library where every video carries the same placement, fill and font looks templated even when all four real axes differ.

Use an unused look picks the legal combination you have gone longest without shooting. The look is stored with the video and shown in its panel, so you can always see what the last few used.

Importing a month

Hand the format to anyone — or anything — and paste the result back.

On the Planned tab, Batch format generates the full specification from the tool's live vocabulary, so it can never describe a world or sound the engine no longer has. Copy it, hand it to any assistant, and import the JSON it returns with Import a batch.

You only supply the axes. The title, tags, description, thumbnail text and axis key are composed here, by the same rules the composer uses — so an imported month can never carry metadata that contradicts its own parameters, and every row is checked against the record for repeats exactly like a hand-composed one.

[
 { "world":"mountain-cabin", "focus":50, "brk":10, "blocks":2,
   "sounds":["brown"], "date":"2026-09-01" },
 { "world":"seascape", "light":"sunset", "focus":25, "brk":5, "blocks":4,
   "sounds":["ocean","birds"], "date":"2026-09-02" },
 { "world":"library", "focus":0, "brk":0, "minutes":180,
   "sounds":["pink"], "date":"2026-09-03" }
]

Rows that break a rule are skipped, not silently accepted — the import reports how many landed and names the reason for each one it refused.

Which sound, which world

One rule settles every case, including worlds not yet painted.

Seabirds crying inside a library is inauthentic in a way no policy needs to describe — it breaks the illusion. The composer greys out anything incoherent, so you cannot ship it by accident.

Two further rules the composer enforces: a noise and an ambient sound never share one video, and never two noises. They compete for the same masking role, and the title can only lead with one of them.

Sync and devices

The pill in the top right tells you which device is writing.

Reads are open to any device. Writes need the passphrase — click the pill to set it. Without one the page still works completely; it just stays on that device and says so.

The server owns the merge, and the rule is simply newest decision wins. A device that has been closed for a week can only ever add information — it cannot roll anything back.

Backups

What survives Cloudflare, the subscription and this machine.

Export downloads the entire record as one JSON file. Import merges a file back in — it never replaces, so restoring an older backup cannot roll the record backwards, and nothing is ever removed by an import.

Reset device is the one exception, and it points the other way: it throws away this browser's copy and takes the shared record as it stands. Use it when a device is carrying rows that no longer belong — it does not touch the shared record.

The tool is three static files with no build step. Kept alongside an export, they will still run from any static host, or straight off a disk, for as long as browsers exist.

Keyboard

For use with one hand while a session records.

If something looks wrong

A video I published is missing

Check All videos with the state filter set to every state — it may have been dropped rather than published. Nothing is ever deleted, so it is still there.

The verdict says a video is new, but I am sure I made it

Compare the axis key under the verdict with the one in the video's panel. If any of the four axes differs — a different block count, a slightly different sound blend — then it genuinely is a different video by the rules we set.

My phone and laptop disagree

Reload both. Each one pulls the shared record on load and then pushes what it knows. If the pill says read-only on one of them, that device has no passphrase and its changes never left it.

A title says "2h 10m" instead of a whole hour

That is deliberate, and it only happens on intervals that do not divide into an hour. On /stage the last break is part of the session, so a runtime is always blocks × (focus + break) — a 50/10 over two blocks is exactly 120 minutes and titles itself "2-Hour". A 45/20 over two blocks is 130, and says so, because claiming a duration the file does not run is the one policy-enforceable risk we carry. Pick a block count the composer marks as landing on the hour and the title will be clean.

My device shows videos that are not on the channel

Press Reset device. Normal syncing merges rather than replaces, which is right almost always — but it means a row deliberately removed from the shared record survives in whichever browser still remembers it. Reset discards this device's copy and takes the shared record verbatim. It never touches the shared record itself; export first if you are unsure.

I added something by mistake

Open it and press drop. It leaves the lists, keeps its history, and frees its combination again.