[Bug 17794] New: Behavior of unconnected nodes needs to be specified

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17794

           Summary: Behavior of unconnected nodes needs to be specified
           Product: AudioWG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: Web Audio API
        AssignedTo: crogers@google.com
        ReportedBy: cwilso@gmail.com
         QAContact: public-audio@w3.org


This can be described as "What happens when a playing node is temporarily
disconnected?" - or, conversely, "If you play a node, and no one is listening
(aka connected), does it really play?".

This first came to my attention when I was working with Z Goddard on the
Fieldrunners article for HTML5Rocks
(http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webaudio/fieldrunners/) - particularly,
read the section entitled Pausing Sounds.  In short - they'd noticed that if
you disconnected an audio connection, it paused the audio "stream".  I thought
this seemed pretty wrong - knowing what I knew about how automation on
AudioParams works - in discussions with Chris Rogers, he confirmed this wasn't
his expected behavior.

My mental model of connections as an API user still really wants to be "they're
just like plugging 1/4" audio cables between hardware units," despite knowing
that is not the case here; I would expect if a node was playing and I
disconnected its graph, then replugged it 0.5 sec later, it would be 0.5 sec
further along - i.e., I would expect the behavior to be the same as if I had
connected the node to a zero-gain gain node connected to the
audiocontext.destination.

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Received on Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:34:22 UTC