Re: Reflections on writing a sequencer

Can anyone tell me if AudioProcessingEvent.playbackTime or
Oscillator.noteOn are implemented in the Chrome beta, dev, or canary
channels?  I like to play with this stuff empirically, and neither of
those exist in Chrome stable...

By my testing, AudioProccessingEvents are sample accurate relative to
one another (see: http://jsfiddle.net/eZPJh/), and I think this is the
intent of the spec draft (says, bufferSize "controls how frequently
the onaudioprocess event handler is called and how many sample-frames
need to be processed").

If I'm right about this, I think it's preferable to polling in a
busy-loop with either setTimeout/setInterval (ugly ~+/-50ms slop in my
experience - really bad / error-prone for audio), or
requestAnimationFrame (presumably sample-accurate, but a more complex
idiom, and outside of the audio API).  ... A drawback to this would be
forcing the use of jsNode, which seems like a leap if one just wants
to schedule start/stop of oscillators/audioBuffers and parameter
automations.

Frankly ... if I had my druthers, I'd like to be able to do something like this:
var scheduler = ctx.createAudioScheduler(schedulingRate, callback);
and then use ... roughly:
var eventList = [...]; // list of (event procedure, relative event time) tuples
function callback(evt) {
    for (var i in eventList) {
        var eventTime = eventList[i].time + evt.playbackTime;
        ctx.callbackAtTime(eventList[i].proc, eventTime);
    }
}
...
scheduler.start();
scheduler.pause();
scheduler.reset();
... etc

I realize that this is arguably a crazy suggestion, but it could
afford arbitrary nesting of event schedules.

Thoughts?  Curses?

Cheers,
Roby

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 8:02 AM, Adam Goode <agoode@google.com> wrote:
> I think you would do node.noteOn(e.playbackTime +
> (samplesWrittenThisCallback / sampleRate)).
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Peter van der Noord
> <peterdunord@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> can you give an example?
>>
>> Let's say i am in my buffer-write loop (in response to an
>> AudioProcessingEvent), and at a certain point in that loop (i may or may not
>> have written a number of values already) i want to call note-on on another
>> node to be fired exactly at the same time that the buffervalue i'm writing
>> (or about to write) would reach the soundcard. how would that work?
>>
>> at least, that's what i understand i can do then...?
>>
>>>
>>> An AudioProcessingEvent exposes the exact time of the audio to be
>>> generated in the sample stream as the "playbackTime" attribute.  Not that
>>> this makes callbacks any more useful as a source of exact timing, but it
>>> does mean that there is no need to keep track of time in separate variables.
>
>

Received on Thursday, 26 July 2012 22:46:06 UTC