SoundOnDemand - Alternative sound engine

[rezoner]

EDIT: The work is done - see http://playgroundjs.com/libs

Below is a draft usage of a new sound engine I am working on.

It will most likely come as a standalone library and plugin to integrate with playground's loader flow

API and features by example:

Setup / channels

/* audio engine */

this.audio = new SoundOnDemand();

/* separate audio channels */

this.audio.channel("sound");
this.audio.channel("music");
this.audio.channel("enviro").reverb(0.5);

/* as you can see you can push your gui bleeps through a clean channel, but if a player is in a cave his footsteps could go through reverbed enviro channel */

/* set master volume */

this.audio.volume(0.5);

/* set channel volume */

this.audio.channel("music").volume(0.5);

/* enqueue sound to be played in next frame or when ready
   con: 1/60 delay
   pro: ondemand loading
*/

this.audio.channel("sound").play("explosion").rate(0.8).volume(1.0);

/* the new engine will load sounds on demand - and play them ASAP - 
    of course manual preloading is still possible */

Other features

• Dynamics compression
• Equalizer
• Automatic sound disposal (free memory if sound has not been used for certain time)
• Panning

  Being lazy?

It take more time to write app.audio.channel("sound").play(...) but there is nothing to stop you from saving a channel this.sound = this.audio.channel("sound")

Variable names reasoning:

• I took app.audio because I am pretty sure you will want to use app.sound for a channel shorthand
• I took channel because it's not Amiga 500 (or AudioElement) and we don't need numeric channels anymore hence I consider this keyword free.

  Technically

• It is an abstraction over WebAudioAPI - still pretty universal - bundled with sane defaults
• If you need a sound system tightly coupled with your game engine - featuring audio emitters, spatial description of these sources (velocity, position) - you should not try to write it on top of this abstraction - but instead start from scratch with WebAudioAPI.