Browser Synth Bug Killed Notes 60 Times a Second Before They Could Sound
A developer building a browser-based audio engine discovered that live playback produced thin, muffled sound while rendering the same project to file yielded perfect audio. After ruling out rogue filters and CPU performance issues, the developer reframed the investigation to focus on structural differences between the two code paths. The key distinction was that live playback relied on a scheduler with a lookahead window, while offline rendering had none. Instrumentation revealed that over 6,600 audio nodes were being destroyed in a single short run, cutting every note off during its attack phase before the sound could develop. The culprit turned out to be an interaction between the scheduler's lookahead window and a seek detector that mistakenly interpreted normal playback progression as a backwards scrub, triggering mass note cancellation roughly sixty times per second.
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