The other half of the audio-substrate decision (spikes S2+S3 green, minted
endpoints landed in the previous commit): stop bundling a third-party
kernel driver the host no longer needs.
installer the VB-CABLE task, payload, silent-install run and the
donationware notice are gone; a suppressible notice tells
a Steam-less box that audio needs Steam INSTALLED (never
running) and that installing it later just works. A cable
from an older install is still deliberately not removed.
packer + CI -VbCableDir/VBCABLE_DIR, the staged-payload check and the
runner provisioning download are gone; SBOM drops the
redistributed-driver component.
winget the VB-Audio bundling-grant agreement becomes the honest
Steam requirement (surfaced on the unattended path where
no wizard is on screen).
docs windows-host/uninstall/security/echo say what actually
ships: no kernel-mode driver of our own, endpoints minted
from Valve's vendor-signed drivers, VB-CABLE mentioned
only as the historical fallback that keeps working.
host wording the mic-open guidance and module headers lead with Steam;
the NAME ladder itself is untouched — demoting 'cable
input' was considered and rejected (on a box where minting
transiently fails, the SSM would outrank an installed
cable, steal the silent sink, and make audio host-audible).
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V mutes and unmutes the microphone mid-stream — V for
voice, since M and S were taken. The uplink keeps running while muted:
`MicStreamer::spawn` takes a shared AtomicBool the capture callback reads
every quantum, and a muted callback drains whole frames and sends
nothing. Stopping the stream instead would have re-primed the device
buffers and, on Linux, re-run source selection on every unmute — a
second of glitch for a key people press mid-sentence. The sequence
counter deliberately does NOT advance while muted, so the host sees one
continuous sequence with a pause rather than a gap the size of the mute,
which its de-jitter would try to conceal frame by frame (its 600 ms
stale-flush covers the rest).
The mute lives on SessionHandle as a MicControl with two flags, not one:
`live` is raised by the pump only once the uplink is actually running, so
a session with the mic off in Settings — or whose capture device wouldn't
open — reports "nothing to mute", the chord says so in the log, and no
indicator appears. Per session, never persisted.
Muted state draws as a persistent "Microphone muted" badge in the stream's
top-right corner, off `FrameCtx::mic_muted` rather than the stats text: it
has to be there with the stats overlay Off, which is where most people
leave it. The Detailed mic line still reads throughput, so it simply falls
to zero — the badge is what answers "am I muted".
Echo cancellation stops being an env-only lever. `Settings::echo_cancel`
(default on, `#[serde(default)]` so every stored file loads with it on)
now gates the same hooks PUNKTFUNK_NO_AEC gated: the echo-cancelled
PipeWire source preference and WASAPI's Communications stream category.
The env var still wins, one-way — it can only turn AEC off, never back on
— and both `aec_enabled` helpers say so. The row ships in the GTK, WinUI
and console settings, under the microphone toggle and greyed out while it
is off, matching what Apple and Android shipped in wave 1.
SettingsOverlay grows `echo_cancel` as a first-class field — apply,
absorb, clear, is_empty — instead of riding the `extra` passthrough, where
`clear_override("echo_cancel")` answered false. The JSON key is the one
Apple and Android already write, so one catalog round-trips through all
three.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
enricobuehler
