A little over five years ago, when a whole lot of people were telling me that Javascript could do anything that Flash could do, whenever I brought up anything related to audio, I'd get silence. Writing something like http://www.audiotool.com/ to operate in the browser was just not possible without Flash (or maybe Java)
The continued envelope-pushing going on at Mozilla with regards to audio in the browser has been great to watch unfold. Part of what made the web browser so interesting to me was that I could easily build things in it using a text editor. I didn't need to buy a compiler or a textbook, because I could look at an interesting website and peek under the hood. It's been a gateway into other more complicated realms of software production for me, and it's exciting to see audio signal processing tools coming into the fold as well.
See, I'm not interested in what Flash could do. I'm interested in what Ableton, Garageband, etc. can do.
With Web Audio, you can't ask for mic permissions without listening indefinitely, using up battery. You can't process audio offline with the exact same API, you have to send a 0 gain signal to the speakers and do it slowly, real-time. Want complex-valued FFTs for adaptive frequency domain filters? Sorry, all you get is a toy magnitude spectrum with shitty exponential smoothing. This isn't envelope pushing in the slightest, and I don't understand why people are impressed by this. Except of course that web developers are easily amused.
In all this HTML5 malarkey, WebGL is the only API that managed to avoid "not invented here" syndrome, and even that is years behind what is considered normal on mobile, with essential extensions still waiting for approval.
Are we supposed to be impressed by the audio capabilities of 15-20 years ago simply because now you get to do them in single-threaded JavaScript, with annoying black box async APIs, shitty number types and no serious high resolution timing control? Go build a web audio API based audio player with real-time effects that can play skip-free for hours on a busy mobile device. Then I'll be impressed.
Sorry but in terms of holding the tempo the browser is still not accurate.Audio Synthesis is only one part of the problem.Flash is bloody accurate in term of sequencing and playing sounds at the right time.The browser is just not.that's why Flash sequencers are possible,but WebAPI ones arent.
I wonder how small the bridge between flashplugin and the underlying OS was to enable easy audio sync. Because other than this, flash and javascript are almost dialect-cousins.
holy crap this is awesome. Firefox is no longer using a proprietary audio API right? assuming it's the standard Web Audio API i might have a reason to reintroduce Firefox to my toolset now. :)
I assume you're mentioning https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API. After we implemented Web Audio, we deprecated and removed support for the Audio Data API.
[+] [-] leviathant|11 years ago|reply
The continued envelope-pushing going on at Mozilla with regards to audio in the browser has been great to watch unfold. Part of what made the web browser so interesting to me was that I could easily build things in it using a text editor. I didn't need to buy a compiler or a textbook, because I could look at an interesting website and peek under the hood. It's been a gateway into other more complicated realms of software production for me, and it's exciting to see audio signal processing tools coming into the fold as well.
[+] [-] jev|11 years ago|reply
With Web Audio, you can't ask for mic permissions without listening indefinitely, using up battery. You can't process audio offline with the exact same API, you have to send a 0 gain signal to the speakers and do it slowly, real-time. Want complex-valued FFTs for adaptive frequency domain filters? Sorry, all you get is a toy magnitude spectrum with shitty exponential smoothing. This isn't envelope pushing in the slightest, and I don't understand why people are impressed by this. Except of course that web developers are easily amused.
In all this HTML5 malarkey, WebGL is the only API that managed to avoid "not invented here" syndrome, and even that is years behind what is considered normal on mobile, with essential extensions still waiting for approval.
Are we supposed to be impressed by the audio capabilities of 15-20 years ago simply because now you get to do them in single-threaded JavaScript, with annoying black box async APIs, shitty number types and no serious high resolution timing control? Go build a web audio API based audio player with real-time effects that can play skip-free for hours on a busy mobile device. Then I'll be impressed.
[+] [-] aikah|11 years ago|reply
Sorry but in terms of holding the tempo the browser is still not accurate.Audio Synthesis is only one part of the problem.Flash is bloody accurate in term of sequencing and playing sounds at the right time.The browser is just not.that's why Flash sequencers are possible,but WebAPI ones arent.
[+] [-] agumonkey|11 years ago|reply
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2268276/what-are-the-key-...
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] agumonkey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jongold|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsgreenb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catshirt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rockdoe|11 years ago|reply
It never had a proprietary API, their proposal for WebAudio just lost out to the Chrome proposal and the latter was standardized.
[+] [-] ehsanakhgari|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarrel|11 years ago|reply