Hacker News Reader

Web Audio is awesome and IMHO people who got the spec out and pushed for implementation deserve lots of respect. You want to make a tracker that runs in your browser and you have all the primitives at your disposal to make it work? A few years ago I wouldn’t imagine it can be possible.

Looking forward to seeing the tracker some time!

View on HN

I have a hotter take, that the spec and implementations were rushed and it makes it hard to push past "toy" quality for web apps. I have seen people struggle and wind up moving mountains to get what is basic functionality and performance in native audio apps.

The other thing is that they have made cardinal sins like relying on direct form biquads for basic filters and using an array for parameters. It's good enough to make a demo but falls apart in the situations that you actually care about, and these are things that the pro audio industry (or similar, like gaming) have had solved for a very long time (*)

* pro audio software is a disaster, but for other reasons

If you worked with Web Audio, what is for you “toy” quality and what do you mean hard to push past it, specifically?

It's super cool! Just from short time that I've been playing around with it, it looks like you can push it pretty far. Before too long I hope to have a Show HN post with a link to the tracker out live in production

Reply on news.ycombinator.com