The Decoder found a blind spot in the bar I shipped last iteration. Raising the
PulseAudio client buffer keeps cutting the gap RATE while total silence bottoms
out and then doubles -- an over-large buffer starves in a few enormous holes
instead of many small ones. Its 500 ms capture scores 1.3 gaps/s, better than a
genuine music bed at 3.3, while being 50% silence. My 20/s bar passed it.
Same shape as the level table that cannot see a duplicated channel: one number,
blind to the failure next door.
I did not set a bar on their numbers, because I do not hold those files and the
last two bars in this tool were wrong precisely from being invented. Instead I
built a control in that regime -- `bigholes`, a real bed with 350 ms holes
punched in -- and set the rule from four controls I can run:
real music+SFX bed 1.1% silence, 3.3 gaps/s PASS
voice track, mono, pauses 53.2% silence, 0.3 gaps/s PASS
bed with 350 ms holes 46.3% silence, 3.2 gaps/s FAIL
the starved capture 35.6% silence, 30.9 gaps/s FAIL
Rate alone cannot separate rows 2 and 3; silence alone cannot separate 1 and 3.
The pair does: fail when >=10% is silent on every channel AND there is at least
one gap per second. Real audio is either mostly not silent, or silent in a few
long stretches -- not both at once.
AND THE REGIME IT STILL CANNOT JUDGE IS PRINTED RATHER THAN PASSED. High silence
with very few gaps is what a real voice track looks like and what an
over-buffered capture looks like; nothing here separates them, so the tool says
UNJUDGED and tells the reader to check against a known source. Inventing a bar
for a regime with no control in it is how the previous two bars came to be wrong.
A CONTROL THAT DOES NOT EXECUTE IS NOT A CONTROL: the tool returned immediately
for single-channel input, so the mono voice track -- one of the four controls --
was never run through the check it was meant to control. Mono now skips only the
duplicate test.
Also recorded: the Decoder has withdrawn "the monitor-sink route cannot be fixed
by configuration". A ~200 ms client buffer is worth a retry BEFORE anyone spends
a session on a Canary rebuild.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N7FiFFFwbvG2uxdcEh8HyF
f2e08ae31d