Re: Making Web Audio APIs More Competitive with native

Very compelling point, if adoption curve is for real.

...joe

On Dec 10, 2010 11:54 PM, "Kumar" <srikumarks@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Chris,

Yes, you're right about the immaturity of OpenSL ES. It is a
relatively recent spec indeed. OpenAL (together with EFX) is
a more mature candidate.

The symmetry I was referring to is more about the broad
principles behind considering existing APIs ... three of them -

1) Reducing developer cognitive load in the long run,
2) Maximizing audio hardware access in the long run and
3) Reducing browser implementation burden in the long run.

On various platforms, we have OpenAL, Core Audio,
DirectSound, OSS, ALSA, ESD, JACK, LADSPA. Of these,
possibly OpenAL has the widest base. If we're to look a couple
of years into the future, I can't help wonder if OpenSL ES
will be the more established native API. It is certainly getting
on to Android [http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/overview.html].

If OpenSL ES is prevalent on mobile platforms and it can
wrap around existing platform-specific audio APIs and codecs,
then having its object model directly available via Javascript
seems likely to maximize the audio hardware access across the
board. Given that platform vendors will provide the implementation,
adopting it will reduce the implementation burden on WebKit/Mozilla,
and reduce the need for developers to work with one more audio API
in the mix.

Regards,
-Srikumar


On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 2:34 AM, Chris Rogers <crogers@google.com> wrote:
> Hi Kumar,
> There's a b...