March 2013
Intermediate to advanced
73 pages
1h 34m
English
Content preview from Web Audio APIBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. Fundamentals
This chapter will describe how to get started with the Web Audio API, which browsers are supported, how to detect if the API is available, what an audio graph is, what audio nodes are, how to connect nodes together, some basic node types, and finally, how to load sound files and playback sounds.
A Brief History of Audio on the Web
The first way of playing back sounds on the web was via the <bgsound> tag, which let website authors
automatically play background music when a visitor opened their pages.
This feature was only available in Internet Explorer, and was never
standardized or picked up by other browsers. Netscape implemented a
similar feature with the <embed> tag, providing basically
equivalent functionality.
Flash was the first cross-browser way of playing back audio on the
Web, but it had the significant drawback of requiring a plug-in to run.
More recently, browser vendors have rallied around the HTML5 <audio> element, which provides native
support for audio playback in all modern browsers.
Although audio on the Web no longer requires a plug-in, the <audio> tag has significant limitations
for implementing sophisticated games and interactive applications. The
following are just some of the limitations of the <audio> element:
No precise timing controls
Very low limit for the number of sounds played at once
No way to reliably pre-buffer a sound
No ability to apply real-time effects
No way to analyze sounds
There have been several attempts to create a powerful ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.