Multiple Sounds do not play properly

[codeHusky]

When you have 2 seperate sounds, it might make sense to play them at the same time, or maybe have overlapping sounds, but the current setup of the sound system does not allow for this.

[kevinbarabash]

Does it finish playing the first before it plays the second?

[kevinbarabash]

I wrote a program which plays two sounds at the same time: https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/simultaneous-sounds/6055715010641920. It works differently in all three browsers on my system:

• Chrome plays the sounds together and will overlap the sounds if you click quickly.
• Firefox will play the sounds together, but if you click quickly it will cut the already playing sounds off, looks like an tag restriction.
• Safari is really bad. First there's a noticeable delay between click and hearing the sound. I also found that sometimes the sounds would start at slightly different times too.

The Web Audio API is much better with handling audio. Unfortunately, it won't be supported in IE until Edge, but we could use tags as a fallback.

[kevinbarabash]

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webaudio/intro/

[codeHusky]

I would suggest using new Audio() and Audio.play(), since I know those work on almost all modern browsers. A tag fallback would be appropreate, though. (On a phone, please disregard typos)

[kevinbarabash]

new Audio() creates an tag. This is what we're doing right now, except we only create one per sound. The problem with creating a new Audio instance for each sound that's played is that it eats up memory. We can mitigate this a bit by keeping a pool of Audio instances for each sound and re-using them as they become available. I'm still a little worried about memory consumption. Do Audio instances with the same source share the same buffer? Is loading an audio sample a second synchronous? If it isn't this approach won't work at all.

I'm also concerned about Safari. Why is there a delay? I'd like to try Web Audio API to see if we can get rid of that delay. Also, I think that Web Audio will provide better memory management because you can explicitly re-use buffers when playing sounds. Of course profiling is necessary to say conclusively that Web Audio API beats new Audio().

[kevinbarabash]

Here's the support matrix: http://caniuse.com/#feat=audio-api

[codeHusky]

The audio api is supported by the majority of all browsers now it looks like.