Check out some awesome HTML5 audio demos with Firefox 4 (video)

Submitted by admin on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 12:00

With so much continued competition surrounding the HTML5 video and canvas tags, one of the other major additions to the HTML5 specification has been all but forgotten by the media: HTML5 audio. Fortunately, the bearded magicians at Mozilla have slightly more foresight than we blood-seeking bloggers, and as a result Firefox 4 has a very cool new addition: the Audio Data API.

If you don't have Firefox 4 installed, or if you just want a quick overview of what you can expect from the next generation of HTML5 Web apps, watch the video above. If you have a nightly build of Firefox 4, play with the demos yourself! The 'beat detectors' require WebGL, which is easy enough to install.

As I discuss in the video, HTML5 audio has some really exciting applications. Combined with WebGL, in-the-browser, standards-compliant (cross-browser!) games become a reality. We'll soon see a YouTube Web app that lets you edit both video and audio -- you'll be able to normalize sound, play with individual channels, cut, splice and so on. How about TV-to-the-browser, with the end-user retaining complete control over the audio stream and its playback? Or, best of all, volume normalization -- imagine an HTML5 add-on that simply turns down the volume on really noisy pages. Bliss.

Finally, if you're a developer, or if you just want to play around with HTML5 audio, Mozilla already has some JavaScript libraries that make the development process both easy and fast. If you need proof, right click and view the source code behind the demos -- most of them use just a few lines of code!

I can't believe we're now able to write music with JavaScript... what a crazy and wonderful world we live in.