Re: ChannelMergerNode mixing semantics seem weird in dynamic situations

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Chris Rogers <crogers@google.com> wrote:

> It's true that the behavior is tricky if the input(s) are changing
> dynamically, so the developer would have to be careful to account for it.
>  But, I believe it's well-defined.  I think in the vast majority of useful
> cases, the inputs would be static in their channels and thus would present
> a stable output.


Yes, which is why I thought maybe eliminating the possibility of dynamic
channel changes would be a reasonable thing to do.

To answer your question about what happens if input 0 has nothing connected
> to it, it just doesn't influence the output at all and is skipped.
>

What if it has a GainNode connected to it, but the GainNode has no nodes
connect to its input? Logically it seems to me that wouldn't influence the
ChannelMerger output either. In that case we are basically saying that the
output of a node can be zero channels ... is that accurate? If so, do all
nodes (other than SourceNodes) produce zero-channel output when they have
no inputs connected?

This all of course needs to be in the spec :-).

Actually I think the issues are even broader than ChannelMergerNode, since
the number of channels a node is producing can be observed by its effects
on upmixing with other nodes. I think that means we need to specify how
many channels of output are produced by nodes at each point in time. For
example, if we have an AudioBufferSourceNode whose buffer has 6 channels,
and we call start(10) on it, then before time 10 is it producing 6 channels
of silence or zero channels?

Rob
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