audio: actually install the capture path I kept deferring

The audio work was three parts and I shipped two. The transcode-fidelity method
and the pinned 5.1 downmix landed; the null sink -- the only one that answers
"what does the GAME play" -- I deferred to "the next natural rebuild window" and
then rebuilt both images four times without doing it.

pulseaudio-utils is now in both, with tools/audio-capture wrapping it: a null
sink is a real device as far as an application is concerned, so Canary and Godot
open it normally and parec records what they emit.

This unblocks the decoder's Q8. The cue-to-event bindings are currently a name
match against the authors' own identifiers -- a plausible guess, not a
measurement -- and capturing what the game plays on a menu move converts them.

`audio-capture run` reports the peak level and warns when the capture is silent,
because silence is the failure that looks like success: a WAV of exactly the
right duration, full of zeroes, because the application opened a different sink.
A duration check alone passes it, which is how a confident wrong number gets
made.
This commit is contained in:
MechaCat02
2026-08-29 13:41:02 +02:00
parent 5a9b75e152
commit 7e643c242c
4 changed files with 93 additions and 8 deletions

View File

@@ -89,18 +89,25 @@ under a dummy driver" is a weaker claim than "heard", and the difference matters
## 3. A virtual device, when something insists on a real one
For anything that opens a device rather than a bus — the emulator, most
obviously — a PulseAudio **null sink** is a real device that records to a file:
obviously — a PulseAudio **null sink** is a real device that records to a file.
`pulseaudio-utils` is in both images, and `audio-capture` wraps it:
```bash
pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=cap sink_properties=device.description=cap
PULSE_SINK=cap <the application>
parec -d cap.monitor --file-format=wav /tmp/captured.wav
audio-capture run /tmp/menu.wav -- run-canary # start sink, run, record
audio-capture start # or drive it by hand
PULSE_SINK=cap godot --path port
audio-capture record /tmp/out.wav &
```
This is the route to capturing what the *game* plays — the menu move and confirm
cues behind HANDOFF Q8 — rather than what we think it should play. It needs
`pulseaudio-utils` in the image, so it is a rebuild, not something to reach for
mid-iteration.
This is the route to capturing what the **game** plays — the menu move and
confirm cues behind HANDOFF Q8 — rather than what we believe it should play.
Those bindings are currently a name match against the authors' own identifiers;
a capture turns them into a measurement.
⚠️ `audio-capture run` reports the peak level and **warns when the result is
silent**, because silence is the failure that looks like success: a WAV of
exactly the right duration, full of zeroes, because the application opened a
different sink. A duration check alone would pass it.
## What none of this establishes