Re: WebAudio feedback and suggestions

Jon,

There is a middle ground between scheduling all your nodes, and having a 100 ms timeout.

What I've done so far in my web audio synth code is to set a timeout at a longer interval (I think mine was 1 s), and schedule a larger number of nodes a longer distance into the future.  This makes it much less likely that a callback delay will affect playback.  In essence you are keeping the scheduler "topped up" so it always has a fair number of nodes to play back.

That might mitigate some of the need for this feature although I see the value of it.

... .  .    .       Joe

Joe Berkovitz
President
Noteflight LLC
84 Hamilton St, Cambridge, MA 02139
phone: +1 978 314 6271
www.noteflight.com

On Nov 16, 2011, at 6:14 PM, Jonathan Baudanza wrote:

> 
> 
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 2:08 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org> wrote:
>  
> For the use-case of "I have a really long playlist and I don't want to schedule it all up-front" (which I think is what https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70061#c0 is about), I think the best solution is to use setTimeouts and just make sure that you keep the playlist up-to-date at least a few seconds ahead of the current time so that it doesn't under-run.
> 
> For interactive stuff, I don't see how running script at a particular moment in the future helps you. Wouldn't your input event handler directly schedule whatever new playback elements it needs to trigger?
> 
> 
> Just for reference, my app is www.beatlab.com.  In my webaudio branch, I have a setTimeout callback set at 100ms intervals.  At each interval it checks if there is a note coming up, and schedules it.  If setTimeout doesn't fire for some reason, sounds aren't scheduled properly.
> 
> I think what you're suggesting is that I schedule all my audio nodes at the beginning of a loop, and then add and remove nodes from the schedule as the user interacts with the application.  I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work.  The downside is that I would have a lot more audio nodes to manage.  The advantage is I wouldn't have to depend on a callback firing at the right time.