webaudio-examples VS wasm-pack

In this article, we'll explore three essential terms in the Web Audio API for our project. For more in-depth information, visit MDN Docs.

Exhausted and having tried out various approaches without much success, I decided to give Web Audio API a try. While it appeared slightly harder to work with, I was frankly running out of options. All that said, moving from HTML5 Audio to Web Audio API involved quite a fair bit of changes and experimentation.

MDN Web Audio Doc

I found the wikipedia article [1] on the subject to be helpful to understand a little bit whats going on here.

I wonder if there's more performant wasm implementations that can interface with the WebAudio API [2]? Quick search brings up things like [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_modulation_synthesis

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...

[3] https://github.com/a-cordier/wasm-audio

Feel free to refer to the official documentation to learn more about the Web Audio API.

You can see details on how to implement this API in your application, including the interfaces that it extends, the necessary permissions, browser compatibility, and much more on its MDN page.

As part of my effort to remake my old Artsy demo in more modern JavaScript, I decided to start with the music player. The original Amiga demo from 1993 used the SoundTracker MOD format, but my remake from 2013 uses an MP3 file, which was a bit of a cheat. Playing an MP3 is efficient and requires almost zero code, but it's not very interesting. Also, it requires loading several megabytes of data. So I decided to try to make a MOD player from scratch, using only the Web Audio API

After taking a good look through the Web Audio API documentation, I decided that the best way for my synthesizer to output sound to the speakers was through the use of the AudioWorkletNode combined with an AudioWorkletProcessor. This combination of two nodes would allow me to generate audio in a background thread which could then be played through the speakers.

Let us take a look at various concepts behind Web Audio API.

For a much simpler but less flexible approach there's wasm-pack for creating JS packages from Rust, and wasm-bindgen for easy interop. Both have very good documentation.

After four years, I found some time to pay that deb-tech (yes, quite a long time, eh). To make it fun I rewrote everything from scratch in SolidJS, which went smooth thanks to this amazing library p5js-wrapper. For WASM, C++ is still a good choice, but what about Rust? I did some research and found wasm-pack. A few lines in the cargo.toml file and we were ready to generate compiled + ready to import bytecode!

Support using wasm-pack in Worklets (particularly AudioWorklet) #689

If you're looking to use it to interface with node/browsers, then try wasm-pack.

Webassembly: wasm-bindgen 0.2.83 / wasm-pack 0.10.3

wasm-pack has bugs - it publishes a module which declares itself as a commonjs module. (You can fix that by manually adding "type": "module" in package.json). Then the web build should work with other bundlers. I opened an issue about this over a year ago. There's a PR and everything, but no movement :/

wasm-pack helps you build Rust-generated WebAssembly packages and use it in the browser or with Node.js.

Is the Rust WASM ecosystem being half dead better? wasm-pack and wasm-bindgen are barely maintained anymore, and trust me it's not because everything works flawlessly…

I've been learning Rust for the past few weeks and have been enjoying it a lot.

- The community is very helpful on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/rust-lang-community).

- The package ecosystem (crates.io) makes it very easy to find and import things, and they're consistently documented.

- There's a path to compiling on web via WebAssembly (https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-pack/)

In a few weeks of learning the language, I managed to put together this visualization: https://twitter.com/admiralakk/status/1542560489091350529

But realistically, either Go or Rust will be fine. You should pick the one you're more likely to stick with and learn, even when it gets tough. I've found the community aspect to be very helpful, because then at least I know I'm not the only idiot out there.

There are various ways to set up a web project that uses Svelte, Wasm, and Rust. For example, wasm-pack from the rust-wasm group provides a template for simple HTML-CSS-JS applications. There are also several project templates for React or Svelte with Rust and Wasm.