Creator ruling (2026-10-30): TRAX is background music and is controlled separately from desktop and
mic — so KISS it:
- TRAX loses its own ladder and slider. It is one number plus ±5 dB buttons, disabled at the ends
(−60 dB floor, +6 dB ceiling).
- It STARTS at −50 dB, taken from the creator's own meter readings, and moves in 5 dB clicks. If that
proves inaudible on their setup, six clicks lands at −20 — the buttons exist for exactly that, and
`TraxDefaultDb` is one constant.
- Layout follows: Desktop's volume now sits directly beneath its ladder, and the TRAX row (name,
play/pause, level) sits beneath that, inside the GAME bay. The bays are MIC | GAME+TRAX | LIP-SYNC.
- The metering tap on the player stays (it is how "is the music producing sound" is answered) but has
no ladder of its own; the desktop bed already shows the music.
Guards updated: TraxBayTests now asserts the stepper wiring and that the row has NO SegmentMeter;
GameBayTests asserts the desktop fader sits below the desktop ladder.
Creator: "why is there no meter for when trax is playing?"
Routing answer: TRAX rides the desktop loopback, so it already moved the GAME ladder — there was no
separate TRAX signal in the mix. But that ladder cannot answer the question a deaf creator actually
has: "is the music producing sound at all?" The play glyph cannot either — an open file with a dead
decoder still reports Playing.
So the player now measures its own output: \`MusicPlayer\` wraps the volume stage in an NAudio
\`MeteringSampleProvider\` and exposes \`Level\`; \`ITraxPlayer.Level\` keeps the fake honest. The VM maps
it through the same display scale (\`TraxMeterFraction\`), zeroed when not playing, and the TRAX bay
carries a 24-segment ladder above its fader.
This reverses my earlier "no ladder, nothing honest to show" — the honest thing arrived with a real
measurement. TraxBayTests flipped accordingly (it now asserts the ladder AND its source).
Unit 7. The bay shows the track name (left-click toggles playback, right-click opens the picker —
the label stays the control), a play/pause button, the duck badge, and a dB level.
No ladder here, deliberately: nothing measures the music bed, and a decorative ladder would break
the measured-not-painted rule. A test asserts the bay has no SegmentMeter.
The level is real: `ITraxPlayer.UserGain` is a new creator gain multiplied onto the fixed design
volume, separate from `LocalGain` (which follows the desktop mute). The VM's `TraxVolumeDb` is the
same dB scale as the other faders, so unity means the bed's design level.
Startup took 44s and 42 of them were one line. Measured from startup.log:
OnStartup 08:42:59 -> MainWindow loaded 08:43:43, with the whole gap inside
LoadLayout, ending at
TRAX: failed to load '\\192.168.50.86\llamaVault\Assets\Music\...':
The network path was not found. (0x80070035)
LoadTrax called MusicPlayer.Load synchronously on the UI thread, and
new MediaFoundationReader(path) does not fail fast on a dead SMB session — it
burns the full ARP/TCP/SMB timeout and only then throws. The NAS had moved to
.87 after the power outage, so an unreachable path became a 40-second frozen
window on every launch.
The rule, from the creator: a probe may time out; a bind should return
immediately. Only one side of that is achievable here, and the reason matters —
an unreachable UNC path has no fast-fail at all, so probing it on the calling
thread is the worst possible probe. (A device open is the opposite: it normally
fails fast on a sharing violation, which is why this bug is network-specific.)
So: IsTrackReachableAsync runs the probe on a thread-pool thread under a
Task.WhenAny ceiling (TraxProbeBudget, 2s) and treats offline/missing/slow as a
normal state rather than an error. Only a probe that passed gets the real bind,
and that bind deliberately stays on the UI thread alongside every other
MusicPlayer mutation — moving the whole load off-thread would have introduced a
race against PlayTrax/PauseTrax that does not exist today. The orphan probe
thread stays parked until SMB gives up; it is not the thread anyone waits on.
One test, per the Good Dog rule: TraxProbeTests.
AHangingProbeIsAbandonedAtTheBudget_AndReportsOffline stands in a probe that
never returns and asserts the caller is released and told "offline". Drop the
ceiling and it fails on elapsed time — which is the frozen window returning.
Suite 381/381, 0 warnings.
gramps