Re: Adding Web Audio API Spec to W3C Repository

I'd like to take a moment to consider design philosophy and use cases.  The
main use cases I believe we need to address in an audio API are:

* Basic Sound Playback - play sound now
* Games
* Interactive Audio Applications
* 3D / Virtual Environments
* Music Applications
* Educational Applications
* Visualizations and Artistic Audio Exploration
* Custom Audio Processing via JavaScript
* Webrtc Communications

My proposal and implementation are designed with all of these use cases in
mind.  I believe that games will be one of the largest consumers of an audio
API, and as such, my proposal includes state-of-art console game engine
features.  It is capable of rendering audio scenes with a complexity and
quality of cutting edge games like "Portal 2" and  "Little Big Planet".
 With the new advanced features now offered in WebGL, and accelerated canvas
2D, I think it's very important to consider the importance of games and try
to bring the level of expectation a bit higher for audio than the casual
Flash games of the past.

As for the integration with the Stream proposal, I've had discussions with
Ian Hickson and we concluded that it would be best to keep the two APIs
separate and provide a way to gain access to a Stream via AudioNode.

I hope we will consider the big picture when designing an audio
architecture.  I think games, music, and other non-webrtc use cases will be
the 90%+ case, so I'm hoping we will have a well considered design for them.
 It's very important to be able to handle integration with webrtc, and Ian
and I have already discussed how to do this.  But an audio API needs to have
good support for games, musical applications, 3D environments, custom
processing etc.  I'm putting forward not just a rough sketch of an API, but
an API with multiple working implementations which I hope will provide a
very high-quality audio experience.

Chris