audio: don't reset a healthy pipeline on tab refocus - #160
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The visibilitychange handler unconditionally ran resetPipeline() when the tab became visible after >3 s hidden, causing an audible dropout on every refocus. Browsers exempt audibly-playing tabs from background throttling, so the pipeline usually keeps rendering while hidden and the preemptive reset was interrupting working audio. Gate the reset on evidence of breakage: stale worklet position reports (>3 s old) or a closed AudioContext. Otherwise run an immediate health check, which still escalates to a reset on real stalls. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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jsegaran
approved these changes
Aug 3, 2026
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Problem
Refocusing the blit tab caused a brief audio dropout. The
visibilitychangehandler inAudioPlayerunconditionally calledresetPipeline()whenever the tab became visible after being hidden for more than 3 seconds — tearing down the AudioContext, decoder, and worklet, then rebuilding on the next frame (async worklet reload + decoder reinit + re-buffering tobufferTarget).The reset was meant as preemptive recovery, but browsers exempt audibly-playing tabs from background throttling: the pipeline usually keeps rendering fine while hidden, so the reset was interrupting working audio on every refocus.
Fix
Gate the reset on evidence of actual breakage:
"closed".Otherwise run an immediate
checkHealth(), which still resumes a suspended context and escalates to a reset on real stalls — so recovery for genuinely broken background audio is preserved.Testing
tsc --noEmitclean, all 566 js/core tests pass.