sounts

A tiny helper library for working with the web audio API written in TypeScript. It has been written to simplify playing sounds in games. It is not meant as a fully-fledged audio library.

Features:

Playing sounds with and without position and orientation (positional-audio / spatialization)
A SoundSource (position + orientation) can play multiple sounds
You can play sounds on channels (if the specified channel already plays a sound, it will be stopped)
Sounds can of course be played freely (not on a channel)
It does not abstract away the web audio API. It only simplifies its usage. So you can still use the full power of the web audio API.

What it doesn't do:

Preloading sounds (that's up to you or a different asset manager)
Manipulating sounds
Fallback if web audio API is not supported

If you are looking for a more complete solution, you might want to take a look at howler.

Fair Warning

The compile target of this library is es2015, so if you want to support older browsers, you'll have to ensure that this module is being transpiled to an older es version during your build-process.

Get started

Read the documentation
Look at the example (example/*.ts).
Ask questions if the above doesn't clarify something good enough.

Goals of this Project

I am a purist. If possible, I like to work with the tools the browser gives me. I don't need an npm package to trim text, filter arrays, etc..

Existing libraries

While looking at existing libraries, I mostly found packages, that have not been updated in almost a decade, had no TypeScript support, weighed a ton or had a lot of dependencies.

The only library I deemed worthy of considering was howler. It's actively maintained, has type definitions via @types/howler and 0 dependencies.

But two aspects remained (If those don't concern you, you should consider howler):

It's big: 9.5kB minified + gzipped.
And it abstracts a lot of the web audio part away.

Working with Raw Web Audio API

After that, I took a look at web audio API tutorials, most of which have been written almost a decade ago. Here are the top 3:

That's a lot to read and a lot to adjust for, as the API has changed a bit since then. Even JavaScript has changed quite a lot since then.

Those tutorials are still worth a read, at least for the theory. You'll have to adjust the code a bit to work with the current standard.

Deciding to Write Something New

So, here I am again starting the same old thought: "There has to be a better way..." (... to get started with web audio).

The goal of this library is to have a simple starting point for writing positional audio code with the web audio API without having to dig into old tutorials and convert all the legacy code examples to the new standard.

You can start writing code with sounts and as you learn more about the web audio API you can extend your code, as sounts does not hide the web audio API from you.

Report issues

Something not working quite as expected? Do you need a feature that has not been implemented yet? Check the issue tracker and add a new one if your problem is not already listed. Please try to provide a detailed description of your problem, including the steps to reproduce it.

Contribute

Awesome! If you would like to contribute with a new feature or submit a bugfix, fork this repo and send a pull request. Please, make sure all the unit tests are passing before submitting and add new ones in case you introduced new features.

License

sounts is licensed under the zlib/libpng, meaning you can use it free of charge, without strings attached in commercial and non-commercial projects. Credits are appreciated but not mandatory.