Re: decodeAudioBuffer, XHR and MIME headers

The lack of MIME type information has in fact already caused lots of
problems for applications, due to partial/broken type sniffing for flexible
formats like MP3. There are some open bugs against FF's implementation
still (I hit one of them; it looks like people have hit others)

Given that there is currently no standard for streaming binary XHR, it is
definitely unfortunate that on top of that decodeAudioBuffer is so rigid.
Some sort of mechanism for either fetching decoded audio from a URI (in one
go) or for streaming chunks of decoded audio as it comes in (a sort of
'request audio from URI; events periodically fire providing decoded chunks
once they are ready' thing) would be welcomed even if it's not necessary.
Right now I have a bunch of code dedicated to handling this problem myself
in a cross-browser fashion, and it eats a lot of extra RAM and CPU cycles
for temporary copies and sniffing and such.


On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Joseph Berkovitz <joe@noteflight.com>wrote:

> Prompted by something Jussi said this morning, I wonder if
> decodeAudioBuffer() doesn't have some other built-in disadvantages for
> processing XHRs besides the extra buffer copying overhead that he pointed
> out:
>
> - XHR response headers for the content MIME type are not available to the
> decoding process, so the data alone must supply information on what what
> codec to use. This may not be an issue to implementors, but I believe that
> the <audio> tag is sensitive to MIME types in some cases, and I wonder why
> decodeAudioBuffer() would be any less interested in that information.
>
> - There is no possibility of decoding incoming data on a pipelined basis
> as it arrives.
>
> I do not suggest we perturb the current API. I am just wondering if it is
> worth at some point introducing an additional decodeAudioURI() call that
> takes a URI, not an ArrayBuffer. I will pass on the debate over whether it
> should return an AudioBuffer or, as Jussi suggested, audio data in typed
> arrays.
>
> Best,
>
> .            .       .    .  . ...Joe
>
> *Joe Berkovitz*
> President
>
> *Noteflight LLC*
> Boston, Mass.
> phone: +1 978 314 6271
>        www.noteflight.com
> "Your music, everywhere"
>
>