[web-audio-api] Behavior of unconnected nodes needs to be specified (#8)

> Originally reported on W3C Bugzilla [ISSUE-17794](https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17794) Tue, 17 Jul 2012 18:34:19 GMT
> Reported by Chris Wilson
> Assigned to 

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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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/WebAudio/web-audio-api/issues/8