gig-up proved the set COMPILES and said nothing about whether anything could make
a sound. scsynth was read only to colour a banner (:106,:115) and to skip --audio
(:202) — it never failed. This morning the audio server had been dead for two days
and the gate would still have printed GO.

--live is a MODE, not the default. Cold-by-default remains right: cold checks are
safe mid-set and must work on a train. Severity is chosen per link, deliberately:

  HARD  scsynth alive / sclang :57120 / SC -> Ardour (>=24 pw links)
        no audio server, no listener, or no path to the DAW = there is no gig.
  SOFT  Tidal :6010, LCXL -> SC, SuperDirt warmed, perf mode
        all legitimately absent ten minutes before doors; a gate that reddens for
        them is a gate PLN stops reading.

Every check reads the thing that MAKES SOUND — a process, a socket, a real pw-link —
never `systemctl is-active`. That distinction is the whole reason this exists: the
unit reported active/running for two days while the rig was mute, because MainPID is
sclang and scsynth is its child.

ALSO, and it came from PLN's ears: "preload covers set", a HARD cold check.

He heard crackles moving do_it_right -> take_5_drops. Measured in that window: 0
SuperDirt lates, 0 pipewire xruns, 17 lazy soundfile reads — all take5:*. Disk I/O,
not CPU. The preload MECHANISM was healthy and said so ("47/47 banks OK in 1.9 s");
it was warming the wrong list. preload.scd was dated Jul 28, header "10 track(s)
scanned", while the set is 13 — because setlist_samples.py reads setlist_opal2026.txt
(10 tracks) and gig-up/cheat-sheet trust set-coherence.setlist_tracks() (13). The
missing three are do_it_right, take_5_drops, electric_hammer: exactly the pair he was
transitioning between. #120 tracks which source becomes canonical — not guessed here.

Two properties made it invisible, and they are the transferable lesson: preload.scd
is GITIGNORED (correctly — generated), so no diff ever showed it drifting, and
NOTHING COMPARED IT TO THE SET. A generated artifact with no freshness check is a
stale artifact waiting for the worst possible moment; its natural debut was a cold
boot at the venue, on the first play of every track added since Jul 28. It only
surfaced at a desk because SuperDirt had been up since Jul 28 with those banks cached
from a first play weeks earlier, and a restart cleared the cache.

tools/check-preload.sh compares BANK SETS (not bytes — the generator stamps a header
and orders banks, so a byte diff would cry wolf), borrows set-coherence's parser
rather than adding a fourth definition of "the setlist", and has --fix.

Validation, all of it adversarial:
 * check-preload mutation-tested — restore the Jul-28 plan and it names the 7 banks
   that would crackle: daft fbreak120 hammer popkick realclaps superfreak take5.
   hammer and superfreak are independently confirmed: they appear as lazy loads in
   this morning's journal, before any of this was written.
 * --live on the live rig: 7/7 green after fixing MY OWN check (below).
 * THE GATE BITES: run under a PATH shim whose pgrep reports scsynth absent ->
   NO-GO, exit 1, correct fix hint, real rig never touched. That is precisely the
   state that printed GO this morning.
 * cold run unchanged: still GO, live chain not executed.

One check was wrong before it was right, in the session's recurring shape. "SuperDirt
warmed" first warned about a rig that was perfectly warm, because
`journalctl --user -u parvagues-sc` returns lines from a PREVIOUS instance on this
box — it handed back Jul 30 output while the current instance had already logged
"51/51 banks OK". Now filtered by SyslogIdentifier and keyed to the unit's own
ActiveEnterTimestamp, so it asks "did THIS boot warm?" rather than "was there ever a
PRELOAD line", which any previous boot would satisfy forever.