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The Audio Incubator is a community forum for discussion of audio topics.

Various W3C specifications, including HTML5, SVG Tiny 1.2, and SMIL, define <audio> and <video> media elements which define how to integrate audio into Web resources. However, none of these specifications provide a way to programatically access or create raw audio data, which could dramatically enhance the way we integrate media on the Web.

Communication

The Audio XG communicates primarily through the public mailing list, public-xg-audio@w3.org ( archive.

The group also holds a bi-weekly teleconference. See the Current Events page for details.

Notes

This page identifies various relevant resources, explores the topic of Web audio, and serves as the starting point for a potential Audio Incubator Group and ultimately an Audio Working Group.

• Audio Incubator Group charter
• Instructions for joining the Audio XG
• Audio API use cases
• Chris Rogers AudioNode-based web audio API spec
• Mozilla page on experimental audio API browser implementation
  • Custom Mozilla builds with audio API enabled:
    • Mac
    • Linux
    • Windows
  • Demos:
    • HTML5 audio visualizations by Nihilogic
  • David Humphrey's blog on experiments with a Mozilla audio API
    • Part 1
    • Part 2
    • Part 2.1
    • Part 3
    • Part 4
    • Part 5
    • Part 6
    • Part 7
    • Part 8
    • Part 9
  • Blog posts by Alistair MacDonald (aka F1LT3R) of Bocoup (with cool demos):
    • Reading the Audio Stream from Firefox 3.7
    • Web Audio – All Aboard!
• Interactive Audio (IA)
  • iXMF, a format for Interactive Audio by IAsig
  • OpenSL ES (Open Sound Library): a cross-platform 3D interactive audio API by kronos.org
  • FMOD, interactive audio middleware by fmod.org
• OpenAL (Open Audio Library): a cross-platform 3D audio API by Creative Labs
  • OpenAL project page
  • OpenAL 1.1 specification (PDF)
  • Wikipedia entry on OpenAL
  • OpenAL tutorial
• Audacity: a free, open source software application for recording and editing sounds
• BBC Save our Sounds: an online sound preservation library
• StandingWave 3: an open source ActionScript 3 audio library for Flash that employs an audio node-style architecture (see API docs)

Voice

Some of the more interesting potential around sound APIs are related to voice. Here are some interesting links:

• W3C Voice Browser Activity
• Mumble/Murmur: an open source, low-latency, high quality voice chat software primarily intended for use while gaming (Mumble), and a server component (Murmur)
• Speex: an Open Source/Free Software patent-free audio compression format designed for speech