Correcting my own framing in 7e57816. The dropout players actually reported was
fixed on 2026-07-23 by a999e5c, and nobody has complained since. I read the
leftover ACQUIRE FAILED lines in the night-5 logs as the same live bug and
raised the ceiling by default. They are not the same bug.
What is still in the logs is transient exhaustion, not a leak: the census sits
at 45-60 live, spikes during a firefight, and drains straight back (226 -> 42),
which is the priority steal loop working. A voice dropped in that window is
competing with ~256 already sounding, so it is very likely sub-perceptual --
which is consistent with the thing nobody is reporting.
And raising the cap is not free. The 256 ceiling doubles as a governor: the
steal loop only steals when the incoming source outranks a running one, so a
higher cap means many more voices mixing simultaneously, and with EFX reverb and
the lowpass chains live that is real CPU -- spent precisely during heavy combat,
when the frame budget is already tightest. I verified the ceiling moves. I never
measured frame time under a real firefight, and a solo bench cannot produce one.
Shipping that to testers tonight would be gambling their framerate against a
complaint nobody is making.
So the knob stays and the default does not move. BT_AUDIO_SOURCES=<n> raises it
with no rebuild if dropouts are ever reported again -- measure frame time while
you do. Unset reports `granted mono=255 stereo=1`, exactly what testers have
been running.
Keeping the diagnostic read-back either way, since it earned its keep: asking
for 64 grants 240, because OpenAL Soft has a floor of its own, which is also why
the NULL default lands on 256. A request is not a promise.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
