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This is really cool & you have a great website! The one thing I don’t quite understand is why this needs to be a React hook per se - couldn’t it just be a norma

• Waterluvian 7y ago
  If you want to be able to keep a handle on a playing sound so that you can stop it or do other things, you've got state. So this is like an audio version of useState.
• joshwcomeau 7y ago
  Right, so the reasons this needs to be a hook: - As someone else said, it manages playback state. This is technically managed by a third-party library, but we expose an `isPlaying` boolean which is held in React state - It lazy-loads Howler, the underlying audio dependency. This means the bundle cost is ~1kb instead of 11kb (gzip) - It memoizes all the callback functions to avoid breaking React.memo / PureComponent components