Re: Requirements for Web audio APIs

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MediaStreamAPI#ScenariosOn Mon, May 23, 2011 at
6:32 PM, Chris Rogers <crogers@google.com> wrote:

> On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>wrote:
>
>> The apparent redundancy is with AudioNode and Stream, not
>> HTMLMediaElement.
>>
>
> For Stream, I assume you're talking about Ian's media capture and
> peer-to-peer streaming proposal:
>
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/video-conferencing-and-peer-to-peer-communication.html
>
> This is designed for peer-to-peer communication.  It's clearly not designed
> for and does not solve the types of use cases and audio processing tasks
> which the Web Audio API is designed to solve.  They're different APIs each
> with their own much different focus and orientation, so I think it's a
> considerable stretch to call them redundant.
>

The redundancy is that both APIs introduce an abstraction representing
streams of audio data which connect sources and sinks.

The Stream proposal supports
-- capturing local audio and video to use as Stream sources
-- using HTML media elements as Stream sinks for output
-- compressing Stream output and capturing the results as a binary Blob
-- using a real-time peer-to-peer connection as a Stream sink

Your AudioNode proposal supports
-- using HTML media elements as sources
-- mixing audio streams with various effects
-- playback of audio output

IMHO everything you can do with a Stream you should be able to do with an
AudioNode and vice versa. I suspect the fact that these specs don't overlap
in functionality (yet) is sheer luck, and the fact that these specs have
grown up separately is an accident. But it's not too late to fix that. We
could perhaps work around it by introducing two-way bridging between Streams
and AudioNodes, but that seems far less elegant than simply unifying Streams
and AudioNodes into a single kind of object.

Rob
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