Bluetooth Audio Delay

[frankcalise]

I'm building a Simon-style memory game on react-native-audio-api@0.12.0 (Expo SDK 55, RN 0.83), targeting iOS and Android. Testing primarily on Pixel devices (Android 14/16).

Audio architecture: per-note OscillatorNode + GainNode, with 4 game frequencies (220/277/330/415 Hz) across 4 waveform sos (sine, square, triangle, sawtooth).

I've encountered some symptoms on Bluetooth (AAC codec, various earbuds)

1. Fast taps inaudible: the ~165ms envelope (15ms attack + 150ms release) completes inside the BT pipeline buffer; user hears nothing. Long holds eventually sound.
2. Audio/visual desync: on pre-scheduled scheduleSequence playback, audio lands 150–250ms after the visual flash.
3. Slight clicks/pops on scheduled notes during sequence playback, varying by frequency (was strongest on 220Hz until we changed our anchor oscillator's frequency).

On speakers: all four symptoms are either gone or barely perceptible. The issue is specific to BT output.

Things I've already tried (most following the piano-keyboard guide's patterns):

• removing an idle ctx.suspend() timer that was tearing down the AAudio stream
• trusting async resume() instead of sync-checking ctx.state
• a silent ConstantSourceNode anchor to keep the context in "running" state
• enforcing a 200ms minimum note duration on user taps
• exponentialRamp envelope with ≥20ms event gaps (per issue AudioParam.setValueAtTime fails when called with many close-together times on iOS #664)
• switching setTimeout cleanup to osc.onEnded
• All helped incrementally but didn't fully solve (1) and (3) on BT.

Is the recommended path for short game-effect sounds to pre-render envelopes into samples and play via AudioBufferSourceNode (as in the piano-keyboard guide), sidestepping the scheduler entirely? Or is there an OscillatorNode-based pattern that I haven't tried that should be click-free at this envelope complexity?

I'm assuming some of the BT lag is just a physics thing (A2DP pipeline depth)? Or am I not thinking about something appropriately? Thanks for the great library, happy to file reproductions for any of this if useful.