See, I'm not interested in what Flash could do. I'm interested in what Ableton, Garageband, etc. can do.
With Web Audio, you can't ask for mic permissions without listening indefinitely, using up battery. You can't process audio offline with the exact same API, you have to send a 0 gain signal to the speakers and do it slowly, real-time. Want complex-valued FFTs for adaptive frequency domain filters? Sorry, all you get is a toy magnitude spectrum with shitty exponential smoothing. This isn't envelope pushing in the slightest, and I don't understand why people are impressed by this. Except of course that web developers are easily amused.
In all this HTML5 malarkey, WebGL is the only API that managed to avoid "not invented here" syndrome, and even that is years behind what is considered normal on mobile, with essential extensions still waiting for approval.
Are we supposed to be impressed by the audio capabilities of 15-20 years ago simply because now you get to do them in single-threaded JavaScript, with annoying black box async APIs, shitty number types and no serious high resolution timing control? Go build a web audio API based audio player with real-time effects that can play skip-free for hours on a busy mobile device. Then I'll be impressed.
>See, I'm not interested in what Flash could do. I'm interested in what Ableton, Garageband, etc can do.
If you're coming from the angle of an Ableton user waving that kind of attitude around, why on earth would you even bring up Garageband, the novelty of which was solely in that it was baked into the operating system. It otherwise was far behind the capabilities of any number of DAWs you, I, or any number of folks here could list.
If you want envelope-pushing audio generation and processing, obviously that's not going to happen in a contemporary web browser. However, reducing developmental roadbloacks so that curious people can more easily dip their toes into the realm of audio DSP is always a wonderful development.
My own personal path went from Screamtracker (free) to Impulse Tracker (free) to Rebirth (affordable) to hardware synthesizers to drums, guitars, amplifiers, modifying analog drum machines, microphones... If it weren't for the taste that I got from an inexpensive gateway (Screamtracker) I wouldn't have plonked down for a cutting-edge Dave Smith Instruments Tempest a couple of years ago. Learning how to do things like flanging, chorus, and delays in the limited environment of mid-90s tracker software helped lay a foundation of understanding for the tools I came to use in the future. I do not still use Screamtracker when I'm recording music, but I continue to build upon what I learned because of Screamtracker.
If you're not impressed by this development because you want to push envelopes, please go back to the music you're making in Ableton and Garageband, which I'm sure is incredible.
If the comment didn't tip you off, I'm a DSP engineer. I don't make music, I make software. The software I want to make, I can't make with the Web Audio API.
Sandboxes are cute, but they are a shitty choice to build the platform of the future on.
I just don't understand why people ignore this elephant in the room.
You're not going to make the kind of software you want to make using the Web Audio API.
However, maybe the kid who's poking around with it on his computer today will be the one who expands on what they learn in that sandbox, and years down the road, sends you a resume that in addition to the typical work/school history, has the kind of exploration-driven side-projects on it that differentiate that resume from the rest of them.
With Web Audio, you can't ask for mic permissions without listening indefinitely, using up battery. You can't process audio offline with the exact same API, you have to send a 0 gain signal to the speakers and do it slowly, real-time. Want complex-valued FFTs for adaptive frequency domain filters? Sorry, all you get is a toy magnitude spectrum with shitty exponential smoothing. This isn't envelope pushing in the slightest, and I don't understand why people are impressed by this. Except of course that web developers are easily amused.
In all this HTML5 malarkey, WebGL is the only API that managed to avoid "not invented here" syndrome, and even that is years behind what is considered normal on mobile, with essential extensions still waiting for approval.
Are we supposed to be impressed by the audio capabilities of 15-20 years ago simply because now you get to do them in single-threaded JavaScript, with annoying black box async APIs, shitty number types and no serious high resolution timing control? Go build a web audio API based audio player with real-time effects that can play skip-free for hours on a busy mobile device. Then I'll be impressed.