Web Audio API channel handling

I don’t want to set to focus of the “Standardizing audio "level 1" features
first?” issue on channel handling, so I decided to start a new thread.

 

Here are some other issues, that I have noticed during development. Maybe
they’re helpful.

 

- Six channel limitation of Splitter/Merger
Currently every splitter or merger is limited to 6 channels. If you have to
merge/split lots of channels (e.g. 40), you need more than one
merger/splitters to handle it. This is not a big thing, because it is only a
limitation by a constant in the source code. But maybe it would be a good
thing to set the number of split/merged channels by the API. My suggestion
is to add a new parameter to context.createChannelSplitter(). An alternative
would be to increase the value of the constant (e.g. to 1024). But I think
the numberOfInputs-attribute of a merger shouldn’t  have a value of 1024.
Also it could be possible that the developer wants to check of the number
inputs the merger is capable.

 

- Upmixing even if a merger is used
Yesterday I set up two configurations (
<http://h9.abload.de/img/updownmix6exmy.png>
http://h9.abload.de/img/updownmix6exmy.png <= I hope this scheme explains it
well). If an merger is used, there is anyway an upmixing (mono to stereo). I
was able to follow the WebCore source code and I had no problems to
understand it. But I just want to say that I expected another behavior. As
workaround I used an AudioNode that writes a mute signal to the buffer. For
me it feels sometimes, that handling with channels (in the way I do) means
also handling with a lot of workarounds. Therefore I would be interested in
other opinions/experiences about the channel handling J

 


Btw. Chris this about WebCL didn't sound as negative to me, I’m just very
interested in other opinions. Thank you for yours!