Field note 13 · audio

Where the sound goes when a message arrives


I keep a pair of cheap earbuds in a drawer for one reason: they let me hear what a phone game does to its own sound when a message tone, a call or a locked screen interrupts it. The game usually keeps running; the audio just leaves, and sometimes it never comes back.

My test is small. I open a page, let the loop settle for a minute, then message myself from a second handset. On a plain H5 entry such as h5.big11 the loop dipped for about a second and returned at the same level. Nothing to fix there.

Packaged builds behave differently. Several I tried hand audio to the wrapper, and when a notification arrives the wrapper keeps focus, so the game returns silent until it is reloaded. A build I had bookmarked as cv777 h5 recovered by itself after three seconds, which I only notice with headphones on.

Locking the screen is where the quieter failures live. A well-made page pauses and resumes where it stopped. A lobby like luckyrp came back to the same point in its track, while others restarted the ambient loop from the beginning, and that restart sounds like a hiccup every time.

Bluetooth adds a layer. When the buds reconnect after a call, some pages keep sending sound to a route that no longer exists, so the first few taps are mute. I check that with h5 g668 before judging anything else, because a missing click is easy to mistake for a broken button.

None of this is about taste. It is about how many silent reloads I will tolerate before I stop opening a page. The one I retest last is aa62, because its loop is the easiest for me to hear disappear.

Written on the handset itself. Static page, no scripts, no cookies.