Padding/probe packets use a sequence number but carry no audio. They were treated as lost, so each one played an invented 20 ms frame (a glitch) and pushed the buffer a frame deeper for drift correction to remove again. Signature in the first live test: lost ~= drift-drops (74 vs 72 per minute). They are now skipped and counted as 'padding'. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>