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I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for

blog.mecheye.net

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Re: I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for

#3

Post by diminish »

>> Can the ridiculous overeagerness of Web Audio be reversed? Can we bring back a simple “play audio” API

To be frank, graphics world had some type of standard (OpenGL) long time ago, next to DirectX. So WebGL had a good example. However in the audio world we haven't seen a cross platform quasi-standard spec covering Mac, Linux and Windows. So IMHO, non-web audio lacks also common standards for mixing, sound engineering, music-making. That's why web audio appears to lack a use case. IMHO, that smells opportunity.

I use Web Audio, in canvas-WebGL based games where music making is needed. I understand the issues - we definitely need more than "play" functionality.

Re: I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for

#4

Post by _pgon »

How to play a sine wave:

  const audioContext = new AudioContext();
  const osc = audioContext.createOscillator();
  osc.frequency.value = 440;
  osc.connect(audioContext.destination);
  osc.start();
"BufferSourceNode" is intended to play back samples like a sampler would. The method the author proposes of creating buffers one after the other is a bizarre solution.

Re: I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for

#5

Post by kruhft »

diminish wrote: post #3

>> Can the ridiculous overeagerness of Web Audio be reversed? Can we bring back a simple “play audio” API To be frank, graphics world had some type of standard (OpenGL) long time ago, next to DirectX. So WebGL had a good example. However in the audio world we haven't seen a cross platform quasi-standard spec covering Mac, Linux and Windows. So IMHO, non-web audio lacks also common standards for mixing, sound engineer…

> However in the audio world we haven't seen a cross platform quasi-standard spec covering Mac, Linux and Windows.

OpenAL: https://www.openal.org/

Re: I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for

#6

Post by revelation »

The major problem of this API is that they couldn't just copy something designed by people with actual knowledge, as in WebGL. So it was design by committee that does so much the application should handle but has so deficient core capabilities no application can rectify any of it.

Re: I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for

#9

Post by Tanner »

This article focuses on emscripten examples and for good reason! The effort to resolve the differences between OpenAL and Web Audio has been on-going and exacerbated by Web Audio's API churn, deprecations and poor support.

That said, this current pull request on emscripten is a fantastic step forward and I'm very excited to see it's completion: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/pull/5367

Re: I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for

#10

Post by mikepurvis »

diminish wrote: post #3

>> Can the ridiculous overeagerness of Web Audio be reversed? Can we bring back a simple “play audio” API To be frank, graphics world had some type of standard (OpenGL) long time ago, next to DirectX. So WebGL had a good example. However in the audio world we haven't seen a cross platform quasi-standard spec covering Mac, Linux and Windows. So IMHO, non-web audio lacks also common standards for mixing, sound engineer…

Whether the API could be used to play MOD files is a good litmus test of its suitability for a variety of purposes. Covers repeatedly playing samples at differing volumes and pitches, simultaneously.

I'd rather have a comprehensive API that someone can dumb down than one that's so crippled as to be unusable beyond very basic functionality.

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