[eric_bullington]

> The API has _zero_ provision for streaming MP3.

Did you look into Media Source Extensions[0,1]? Fetching and playing the various audio formats is a bit outside the purview of Web Audio. But you can feed streaming MSE into Web Audio. If I recall, you use Web Audio's `AudioContext.createMediaElementSource()` to use a (potentially chunked) MSE source with web audio, but it's been a while since I did this.

That said, Media Source Extensions (MSE) is only supported on relatively modern browsers (IE11+) but you should be able to use it to stream mp3 to the Web Audio API on supported browsers.

There's also a way to do this without using MSE for older browsers. See the 72lions repo below for an example[2]. It's a bit convoluted, but not as much work as your workaround. As described in the README of the 72lions proof-of-concept:

"The moment the first part is loaded then the playback starts immediately and it loads the second part. When the second part is loaded then then I create a new AudioBuffer by combining the old and the new, and I change the buffer of the AudioSourceNode with the new one. At that point I start playing again from the new AudioBuffer."

0. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Media_Sourc...

1. http://dalecurtis.github.io/llama-demo/index.html

2. https://github.com/72lions/PlayingChunkedMP3-WebAudioAPI

[_jal]

> Fetching and playing the various audio formats is a bit outside the purview of Web Audio

Just looking at that clause makes me think perhaps the Web Audio API should have been called something else.

Can you imagine writing "fetching and displaying various image formats is a bit outside the purview of HTML"?

(I realize that's a bit apples 'n oranges.)

[AgentME]

I think it's more like "fetching and displaying various image formats is outside the purview of HTML5 canvas".

If you want to just show an image, you use an <img> tag, or just play an audio file you use <audio>. Canvas and the Web Audio APIs are for pages that want to make or mix their own images/audio. Though to be fair, html/javascript do make it easy to load image data from an image tag directly into a canvas; maybe there's a missing parallel for audio.

[akira2501]

If I recall, as we did that project a year and a half ago, MSE either wasn't available at that time or the latency was entirely unacceptable. I should have noted that with the setup I described above we are able to achieve <150ms of latency in most cases; and as the system also allows remote control of matrix sources and mixers, the low latency was required in order to accurately manipulate the system under certain working conditions.