Forums » Impact Engine » Extending Audio

Hi all,
Welp, bought Impact last week and made a game in with it in ld48 this weekend. Very happy with it (the engine that is, the game was awful :P)!

However, for a future project, I'm looking for some more oomph in the audio department. Something beyond the current capabilities of just playback, looping, volume. For instance, position/panning, pitch/rate, simple fades, etc. would be nice.

Are there any JS libraries out there I'm missing that could be integrated or is SoundManager2 the best we have?
Also, is this currently severely limited by the HTML5 audio element?

Any info would be appreciated =)

Yes, this is severely and principally limited by the HTML5 audio element's specification and implementation. I don't believe the features you mention are generally provided for, but may be in the future, assuming the browser makers ever actually agree on a single format as opposed to the different formats currently in play.

SoundManager 2 is about the best I've seen but note that it's not a pure JS solution, it uses a small and lightweight Flash widget to handle playback cleanly.

Well titty biscuits, that's what I was afraid of. Seems like a real crapshoot right now, not even knowing if/what the browser will actually be able to play. I'll look more into SoundManager2, but thanks for the heads-up about its Flash component.. I'm trying to move away from plugins.

In that case, I reckon I'll stick with native apps for audio-intensive projects.

Thanks for the reply, Arantor!

It pretty much is a crap shoot. Sadly, we haven't come very far since Dominic's post of March this year, http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/03/the-state-of-html5-audio

Ugh, it's even slightly worse than I thought. I don't know I feel about 'requiring' people to use a specific browser to optimally play my game as opposed to requiring a plugin.

how does soundmanager work with impactios?

It doesn't. iOSImpact doesnn't support Flash, neither does Safari Mobile.

However, as Biolab Disaster proves, it doesn't work too badly at all calling just the core functions from iOSImpact, and if you're willing to use Objective-C, you can do anything for iOS devices.

Furthermore, to keep the audio discussion rolling,
What are everyone's thoughts regarding these audio APIs from the browsers? (i.e. Web Audio API and Audio Data API)

if you're going to make games for the masses, use

soundManager2 for web. It defeats the HTML5 purpose, but your users will get the best experience.

you can go with Web Audio/Audio Data APIs , but you have to test a LOT. I've experienced crashes when lots of sounds are playing.