from Hacker News

Resonance Audio: Multi-platform spatial audio at scale

by jamest on 11/6/17, 5:05 PM with 11 comments

• by minus7 on 11/6/17, 7:08 PM

  Please, Google, I don't care about related articles while I'm reading this one, bugger off.

• by ndarilek on 11/6/17, 6:59 PM

  I'm poking the docs, can't find an answer for this, so am hoping someone smarter than me can help. For years I've wanted to build audio games on the web (see http://audiogames.net for examples of what I mean.) The resource requirements for these just aren't that intense, so JS/the web seems like an interesting delivery platform, but the Web Audio API's support for what I'd need to do this is...disappointing is the nicest way I'd put it.

  My biggest missing feature is a listener/sound source API that renders to 5.1/7.1 surround. Does Resonance do that? Yes I understand that headphones/binaural rendering is ideal, but I have a decent surround system and sometimes I want to put it through its paces. :)

  The Getting Started section demonstrates stereo downmixing. Peeking at the API indicates I can pass something called an ambisonic order into some functions, but even the constant for the default gives me no obvious indication of what this means. So maybe this is something audio developers know, but as someone trying to evaluate Resonance, it seems like they've just handwaved around this concept.

  And if Resonance doesn't do this, does anything? Even if I compiled to wasm, which is certainly something I'm open to, it looks like the only wasm options are SDL-based, meaning simple stereo and no spatialization. But maybe I've just picked terrible keywords to search for.

• by science404 on 11/6/17, 6:59 PM

  guess this superceeded Songbird: https://google.github.io/songbird/, previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031828

  edit: indeed, https://github.com/google/songbird now redirects to https://github.com/google/resonance-audio

• by smustin on 11/6/17, 6:49 PM

  nice work!