Show HN: Microm – JavaScript library to convert microphone to mp3 in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Microm – JavaScript library to convert microphone to mp3 in the browser

github.com

46 pointssorros16 comments

I work for a children's book company and wrote something similar for recording children reading aloud. Looking into the licensing on distributing an MP3 encoder to hundreds of thousands of machines it became unreasonable. I've started playing with conversation to Speex instead with conversion to MP3 server side, and that seems much more reasonable.

Speex has been deprecated. You should consider Opus instead.

Huh, I should. The upside of Speex was just that I found a prebuilt library that more or less worked out the box. The project itself fell to the back burner about a year ago.

Awesome! Does anyone know of a similar library for Ogg/Opus?

HTML5 MediaRecorder

Cool, I didn't know about that API. Looks like it's Firefox only right now, but it might still be useful.

I put together iago[1] a little while back, from a few people's work, including a great article[2] by Hot Cashew on how he uses Emscripten to transpile the Ogg/Vorbis library to javascript.

[1] - https://github.com/itsjoesullivan/iago

[2] - http://hotcashew.com/2014/02/chrome-audio-api-and-ogg-vorbis...

Sweet, thanks. I actually want a streaming solution to send the result over a websocket, but this looks like a good starting point.

Seriously, MP3? Not only is it old and poor quality compared to modern alternatives, by hosting an MP3 encoder it appears you are liable for a minimum royalty of $15,000 USD/year[1], because it's a patented format.

This is why we need open codecs: Vorbis or Opus are much better quality and free to use!

[1] http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

MP3 is the only audio format that works across all browsers. Vorbis and Opus only work on Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Aside from that, your comment could really be stated in a less harsh way.

Also AAC in MP4*

*https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Supported_...

Which is more than what the library supports right now

> The library just work in Chrome and Firefox right now.

:-)

MP3 does not work unless explicitly installed for many GNU/Linux distributions. I would not install it.

Why is there so much snark with programmers? It's a real deterrent for either hackers trying to make something useful or for new-comers interested in programming

(Almost) completely unrelated.. why do HW manufacturers still use HDMI?

Momentum, and it supports longer cable lengths (>3 meters) than DisplayPort.

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