So why did the W3C choose Google's audio proposal? Was there some kind of political wrangling going on there or were there purely technical reasons? I've wondered about that for a while.
The Google proposal was more full featured than the Mozilla Audio Data API. It provided more functionality baked in vs having to implement it in JS. This was considered important for mobile devices.
Another advantage of the Google proposal was they had a spec and implementation from the start. The Mozilla proposal had a wiki page write up and an implementation and I don't think there was as much effort put into promoting it as Google did into theirs.
Because it was the better API? Game devs all over the net have praised the Web Audio API
The Mozilla proposal required audio processing in JavaScript which in some ideal world is a great idea but in the real world where you want audio running on Intel ATOM and mobile processors and still have time to run other code is the not such a good idea.
Mozilla countered with another proposal, the Stream Processing API (https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/audio/raw-file/tip/streams/StreamProc...) but this was a bit too late.
Another advantage of the Google proposal was they had a spec and implementation from the start. The Mozilla proposal had a wiki page write up and an implementation and I don't think there was as much effort put into promoting it as Google did into theirs.