[note] Web Audio API

Tilgovi[1] just left a note on "Web Audio API"[2].

> For web applications, the time delay between mouse and keyboard events (keydown, mousedown, etc.) and a sound being heard is important. This time delay is called latency and is caused by several factors (input device latency, internal buffering latency, DSP processing latency, output device latency, distance of user's ears from speakers, etc.), and is cummulative. The larger this latency is, the less satisfying the user's experience is going to be. In the extreme, it can make musical production or game-play impossible. At moderate levels it can affect timing and give the impression of sounds lagging behind or the game being non-responsive. For musical applications the timing problems affect rhythm. For gaming, the timing problems affect precision of gameplay. For interactive applications, it generally cheapens the users experience much in the same way that very low animation frame-rates do. Depending on the application, a reasonable latency can be from as low as 3-6 milliseconds to 25-50 milliseconds.

For some use cases it's extremely important that the software be aware of the latency in the audio pipeline. While some latency might be hidden in hardware or software buffers, and not available to the user agent even through the underlying platform APIs, it might be useful to provide a way to interrogate buffer sizes, etc of the underlying system.

View this annotation: https://notes.webplatform.org/a/28zMsJUoS3qWt7t8EhMAqg

[1] https://notes.webplatform.org/u/Tilgovi
[2] http://www.w3.org/2014/annotation/experiment/webaudio.html#Latency

Received on Friday, 24 October 2014 18:19:35 UTC