The Web Audio API as a Standardized Interface Beyond Web Browsers

Abstract

In this paper, the authors present two related libraries, web-audio-api-rs and node-web-audio-api , that provide a solution for using the Web Audio API outside the Web browsers. The first project is a low-level implementation of the Web Audio API written in the Rust language, and the second provides bindings of the core Rust library for the Node.js platform. The authors’ approach here is to consider Web standards and specifications as tools for defining standardized APIs across different environments and languages, which they believe could benefit the audio community in a more general manner. Although such a proposition presents some portability limitations due to the differences between languages, the authors think it nevertheless opens up new possibilities in sharing documentation, resources, and components across a wide range of environments, platforms, and users. The paper first describes the general design and implementation of the authors’ libraries. Then, it presents somebenchmarksoftheselibrariesagainststate-of-the-artimplementationfromWebbrowsers, andtheperformanceimprovementsthathavebeenmadeoverthelastyear.Finally,itdiscussesthecurrentknownlimitationsoftheselibrariesandproposessomedirectionsforfuturework. Thetwoprojectsareopen-source,reasonablyfeature-complete,andreadytouseinproductionapplications.