[jancsika]

Just from skimming the spec, the AudioWorklet interface looks very close to what is needed to build sensible, performant frameworks for audio profs and game designers.

So the most important question is: why isn't this interface implemented in any browser yet?

That a BufferSourceNode cannot be abused to generate precision oscillators isn't very enlightening.

[bzbarsky]

> why isn't this interface implemented in any browser yet

Partially because in addition to the interface itself it relies on a bunch of generic worklet machinery which also doesn't exist in any browser and is not trivial to implement in non-sucky ways.

But also partially because the spec has kept mutating, so no one wants to spend time implementing until there's some indication that maybe that will stop.

[symstym]

It's been under development for a very long time in Chromium: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=469639

I think there were some false starts where previous specs were written and then found to have issues.

[kevingadd]

For bonus points, prep work done for the eventual rollout of AudioWorklet in Chromium shipped a bug to release channel Chrome that breaks all uses of Web Audio. The bug wasn't caught in beta/canary channels because it only affects some user machines, and they can't revert the bug because of architectural dependencies. A basic way to summarize it is that AudioWorklet required the threading structure of Web Audio to change for safety reasons, and this results in a sort of priority inversion that can cause audio mixing to fall behind forever. Even simple test cases where you play a single looping sound buffer will glitch out repeatedly as a result.

So basically, Web Audio is unusable in release Chrome on a measurable subset of user machines, for multiple releases (until the fix makes it out), all because of AudioWorklet. Which isn't available yet.

I am being a little unfair here, because this bug isn't really the fault of any of the people doing the AudioWorklet work. But it sucks, and the blame for this horrible situation lies largely with the people who designed WebAudio initially. :(

[jancsika]

> But it sucks, and the blame for this horrible situation lies largely with the people who designed WebAudio initially

Just skimming it a bit, it seems like they tried to make the same kind of "managed" framework for an audio graph that SVG spec does for vector graphics. And even if SVGs are janky the static image still succeeds in serving a purpose. But if you get dropouts or high latency in audio, there isn't much more it can be used for. (Aside from browser fingerprinting :)