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by stupidcar 3207 days ago
Nope. Web Audio was designed almost entirely by a single person, Chris Rogers, an engineer with a long history of working on audio for Google, Apple and Macromedia[1]. Whatever Web Audio's problems, design-by-committee is not their cause.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/diagonal/

2 comments

> Web Audio was designed almost entirely by a single person, Chris Rogers, an engineer with a long history of working on audio for Google, Apple and Macromedia[1].

Who at Apple beat him with a stick to get audio right? Can we get that person to design the audio API's for the Web and Android?

(Edit: I realized that this was an unfair comment born of my frustration with Audio APIs from Google.

The real issue driving this is that audio is still a dumpster fire on Android. So, if he gives web developers access to audio samples, everybody is going to expect it to work. And, on Android, it will fail miserably. So, better to isolate audio functions, give them "fuzzy" latency which you can bury in C code drivers, and hide the fact that audio on Android is a flaming pile of poo rather than piss off even more developers and get even more bugs filed against Android's shitty audio.)

Yes, in fact the problem here is that Rogers barely considered spec input from outside (and others at Google have continued this behavior). A committee's design would've resulted in a better outcome in this case.