SonicRuntime 1.0.0

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Native audio runtime sidecar for sonic-core. C# NativeAOT binary that handles playback, device routing, and synthesis over ndjson-stdio.

What This Is

A subprocess sidecar that handles the native audio concerns sonic-core delegates:

• Playback — load, play, pause, resume, stop, seek, fade, volume, pan, loop
• Device control — enumerate outputs, per-playback device routing, handle hot-plug
• Synthesis — Kokoro/ONNX TTS inference producing playable audio

sonic-core launches this as a child process and communicates over newline-delimited JSON on stdio.

What This Is Not

• Not a standalone application
• Not a UI
• Not a session manager, preset store, or product layer
• No leases (owned by sonic-core)
• No user state, therapy concepts, or product semantics

See ADR-0005 and ADR-0006 for the architectural rationale.

Stack

• C# / .NET 8 LTS with NativeAOT — single native binary, no JIT, no runtime dependency
• OpenAL Soft via Silk.NET — low-latency audio playback and device management
• ONNX Runtime 1.22.0 — Kokoro TTS inference via managed C# binding (NativeAOT-compatible)
• eSpeak-NG 1.52.0 — grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (spawned as child process)
• Windows-first (v1)

Build

dotnet build

Test

dotnet test

Publish (NativeAOT)

dotnet publish src/SonicRuntime -c Release -r win-x64

Output: src/SonicRuntime/bin/Release/net8.0/win-x64/publish/SonicRuntime.exe

Protocol

See docs/protocol.md for the full wire protocol specification.

Quick example:

→ {"id":1,"method":"version"}
← {"id":1,"result":{"name":"sonic-runtime","version":"0.5.0","protocol":"ndjson-stdio-v1"}}

→ {"id":2,"method":"load_asset","params":{"asset_ref":"file:///rain.wav"}}
← {"id":2,"result":{"handle":"h_000000000001"}}

→ {"id":3,"method":"play","params":{"handle":"h_000000000001","volume":0.8,"loop":true}}
← {"id":3,"result":null}

Architecture

stdin (JSON) → CommandLoop → CommandDispatcher → Engine components → stdout (JSON)
                    │                             ├─ PlaybackEngine (OpenAL Soft)
                    │                             ├─ DeviceManager (hot-plug, enumeration)
                    │                             ├─ SynthesisEngine (Kokoro ONNX → WAV → playback)
                    │                             │   ├─ KokoroTokenizer (eSpeak G2P)
                    │                             │   ├─ KokoroInference (ONNX Runtime)
                    │                             │   └─ VoiceRegistry (510 voices, raw float32)
                    │                             └─ RuntimeState (handle tracking)
                    └─ IEventWriter → stdout (unsolicited events)

All diagnostic output goes to stderr. stdout is exclusively for protocol messages and runtime events.

Synthesis Assets

Real synthesis requires model files, voice embeddings, and eSpeak-NG. See docs/synthesis-assets.md for the full operator contract.

Status

v0.5.0 — Per-playback device routing, OpenAL Soft backend, 95 tests.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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