[Jasper_]

> It's a higher level API

As the title of the post asks: "I don't know who the Web Audio API is designed for".

The high-level nodes are not featureful enough for professional audio production, and too slow and underspecified for game engines like FMOD / Wwise.

The low-level bits fall somewhere between impractical, deprecated, and useless.

Who is it designed for?

[_pgon]

I think you're missing the point entirely. It's like a modular synthesiser. It's not "serious business" but this is the browser after all.

Plug a few oscillators into each other and you have an FM synth. Feed delays into each other, etc, etc. You can do that in a few lines of code with no dependencies.

To me, that's a huge potential audience.

If you want a array of samples and depend on dozens of JS libs for functionality, well, I'm sure the AudioWorkers will catch up eventually.

[symstym]

The ability to build primitive synths in a few lines of code (w/o library dependencies) is fine and well, but should not have been a priority for becoming a web standard. What's desperately needed is a well-designed low-level API. That could have been done years ago, and then if there was still sufficient demand for built-in nodes, those could have been added later.

As far as potential audience, in the time I've spent lurking in the Web Audio community, it seems like developers fall into one of two camps: 1) building toy projects for their own edification/learning, and happy to have the Web Audio API 2) trying to build a serious product (DAW, game, whatever) and super frustrated with the API. It seems pretty clear to me that end-users would be much better off if camp 2 had a good low-level API to work with.. camp 1 is not making much that gets used by end-users.

> It's not "serious business" but this is the browser after all.

Modern JS performance is actually quite good, and WebAssembly is only going to make it better. I think you underestimate the potential of audio processing in the browser.

> It's like a modular synthesiser.

I own hardware modular synths, and I built a proof-of-concept modular synth environment using the Web Audio API (https://github.com/rsimmons/plinth). The API makes it hard to build even simple things like well-behaved envelope generators or pitch quantizers. So even if you viewed the API as a sort of code-level modular synth environment, it's pretty unsuited to anything beyond trivial use cases.

The browser-based experimental/modular audio stuff that has any traction (e.g. https://github.com/charlieroberts) doesn't use the built-in nodes for these reasons.

[Jasper_]

So, the answer to "Who is the Web Audio API designed for", according to you, appears to be "people who want primitive FM synthesizers".

Not game developers, not professional audio production people. It's... not an answer I was expecting, but I suppose it's valid.

[Lazare]

Talk about damning with faint praise.

[wpietri]

> It's not "serious business" but this is the browser after all.

This answer would have made sense to me circa 2003, but I cannot fathom it today. The web started as "let's put academic papers online". It moved to "let's put magazines online" with some modest interactivity via forms.

But we've spent the last 10 or 15 years turning the web into a "you can do anything" platform. There's been huge progress in interactivity and visuals. There's no a priori reason audio should lag so far behind.

[TheOtherHobbes]

There has been huge progress in visuals, but the web is basically still a document and content delivery system decorated with a few animation features, not a full-fat creative multimedia OS.

And that could be because there are institutional forces keeping it at a certain level of clunkiness, which is far short of the requirements of professional media creators who work with video, 3D, and sound.

I suspect the real problem is that the walled-garden corporates don't want the web to compete with their lucrative app farming operations.

Unless that changes, the creative edges of the web will remained dumbed down.

And it probably won't change. Ever.

If that's correct, the original question has a simple answer: Web Audio is designed to meet the corporate requirements of Apple and Google, not the needs of web users or web developers.

[Jasper_]

If Google really wanted to limit the power of Web Audio in order to boost Android apps, you would think they would have made a usable Android audio API as well...

[FeepingCreature]

I guess we're all in agreement that it's a toy.