Let a piece be made without a video

[ibrahimweng]

You could already place sounds with no clip loaded. You could set the length by hand, and export what you made. The one thing you could not do was hear it, and nothing said so: the play button was live, pressing it moved nothing, and the status line stayed empty.

Underneath, video.play() was being refused on an element with no source and the refusal was swallowed — the catch there is for a browser blocking autoplay, which looks identical and is not what was happening. So a dead-looking button, which is the fault this app keeps having.

The machinery already existed

The playhead has run off the audio clock past the end of a clip since the picture stopped being the only thing that could drive it. No clip at all is the same case reached from the other end: nothing to follow, so the audio clock decides from the first frame rather than from wherever the picture ran out.

Three changes

• The clock treats no picture as beyond the picture, in both play and seek. Where there is a frame to hold on it still holds; where there is none there is nothing to hold.
• The transport is greyed out on whether there is a piece rather than whether there is a clip. It was the clip, which meant even a working clock would have had stop, the step buttons and the shuttle greyed out beside a play button that ran. The video window toggle keeps the old rule, since a window with no picture in it is nothing at all.
• A new piece opens thirty seconds long instead of zero. A piece of no length has no ruler worth reading and no room to put anything, so the app looked broken until you found the length control. A loaded clip replaces it outright, so nobody who starts with a video ever sees it.

Checking

Nine tests: five on the clock, four driving the app.

• a new piece already has a length to work in
• the transport is live rather than greyed out
• a sound can be placed and played with no picture, and pausing holds where it stopped
• the clock runs on the audio clock from the first frame, queues the cues on the way past, can be seeked and holds where it was put, and still stops at the end of the piece

All nine fail with the three changes put back — the clock's two, the transport gate, and the zero default.

236 unit tests (was 231), 59 browser tests (was 55), build clean.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ux1kydvUkLRoMbHp82ofDi

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Generated by Claude Code

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
beat-studio	Ready	Preview	Aug 30, 2026 1:35pm