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Show HN: Recreate NASA's Apollo Space Beeps (Quindar Tones) with Web Audio
- backwardm 11y agoPretty neat! I've heard those beeps a lot but never knew what they were for. Also, is it me, or do the sounds in the example recording sound the same? (frequency-wise?)
- outputchannel 11y agoThanks! Listening to the recording, I'm reasonably sure I can distinguish the two different frequencies, but there's no denying they sound very similar. They're so close there's less than a semitone between them.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoWow, this really made me realize how crappy the state of web audio is today. Excellent work otherwise though.
- vortico 11y agoWhy is it crappy? You create a sine oscillator, connect it to output, and call .play(). Or are you referring to issues not addressed in this article?
- InclinedPlane 11y agoThe output quality is terrible, very crackly (on chrome and firefox). I don't see any reason for that in the code so I assume it's just due to the way web audio is in general. I can understand why it isn't used more often.
- pippy 11y agoit sounds your processor can't keep up with your sound buffer. you can start Google chrome up with --audio-buffer-size=2048 to increase it All audio technologies have buffer issues, it's a pretty basic problem. it's not unique to web audio.
- djrogers 11y ago> it sounds your processor can't keep up with your sound buffer Is this 1994? We've been playing fancy, high definition, multi-channel audio on our computers for decades now, and it's been ages since I've seen it impact the CPU. > All audio technologies have buffer issues, it's a pretty basic problem. it's not unique to web audio. I would say that in 2015, for most people it is unique to web audio. Generally speaking when someone wants to play audio on their computer it just works.
- vortico 11y agoThis is because "fancy, high definition, multi-channel audio" has >40ms latency, so you cannot compare it with Web Audio, which is meant to be real time like in digital music settings, where often <8ms is required. You clearly do not understand the problem you are claiming to be simple.
- pjc50 11y agoHow can web audio be realtime when it doesn't have a realtime scheduler? That may be driving this problem: the browser's javascript engine not being scheduled in time by the underlying operating system.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoNope, that's not it, makes no difference. Saying that all audio technologies have issues is a dodge. Technology is hard, software is about dealing with problems not about passing the buck and saying "sorry it sucks, it's hard and I gave up". Computer audio isn't exactly rocket science, tons of products get it right, browser makers just can't be bothered to invest in it.
- vortico 11y agoThe tape recordings of Apollo sound a few dozen Hz lower than the web audio version. Is this because of an inconsistent tape driver?
- J_Darnley 11y agoIs there a download available for offline listening?
- outputchannel 11y agoHello, post author here, were you thinking about downloading the NASA sound clip or the web audio recreation?
- J_Darnley 11y agoEither but originally I meant the recreation.
- outputchannel 11y agoOk, no problem, I've uploaded both audio files to my SoundCloud account (https://soundcloud.com/outputchannel https://soundcloud.com/outputchannel) and you can download them by clicking the download button beneath the waveform display.
- J_Darnley 11y agoNeat and thanks.