Two costs on every cloned line.

F5TTS(device=…) was constructed per request, so the model and its vocoder were
loaded from scratch for each line of dialogue — seconds of latency and a fresh VRAM
allocation every time. seed-vc next door already keeps a singleton; F5 now does
too, rebuilt only if the device changes, and registered with
register_external_vram_releaser so the manager can reclaim it like the LoRA base
cache and the OCR engines.

And nothing capped the reference. F5-TTS prompts on the clip and gains nothing past
roughly 15 s, while a saved profile can hold minutes — the character studio uploads
90 s. Both the /v1/audio/clone path and the dialog path now trim to
MAX_REF_SECONDS (15, override with CODERAI_F5_MAX_REF_SECONDS), leaving anything
already short untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0182DhR1eFNPQyGmDrpHbedY