
Show HN: Recreate NASA's Apollo Space Beeps (Quindar Tones) with Web Audio - outputchannel
http://outputchannel.com/post/quindar-tones-in-web-audio/
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backwardm
Pretty neat! I've heard those beeps a lot but never knew what they were for.
Also, is it me, or do the sounds in the example recording sound the same?
(frequency-wise?)

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outputchannel
Thanks! Listening to the recording, I'm reasonably sure I can distinguish the
two different frequencies, but there's no denying they sound very similar.
They're so close there's less than a semitone between them.

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vortico
The tape recordings of Apollo sound a few dozen Hz lower than the web audio
version. Is this because of an inconsistent tape driver?

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InclinedPlane
Wow, this really made me realize how crappy the state of web audio is today.

Excellent work otherwise though.

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vortico
Why is it crappy? You create a sine oscillator, connect it to output, and call
.play(). Or are you referring to issues not addressed in this article?

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InclinedPlane
The output quality is terrible, very crackly (on chrome and firefox). I don't
see any reason for that in the code so I assume it's just due to the way web
audio is in general. I can understand why it isn't used more often.

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pippy
it sounds your processor can't keep up with your sound buffer. you can start
Google chrome up with --audio-buffer-size=2048 to increase it

All audio technologies have buffer issues, it's a pretty basic problem. it's
not unique to web audio.

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djrogers
> it sounds your processor can't keep up with your sound buffer

Is this 1994? We've been playing fancy, high definition, multi-channel audio
on our computers for decades now, and it's been ages since I've seen it impact
the CPU.

> All audio technologies have buffer issues, it's a pretty basic problem. it's
> not unique to web audio.

I would say that in 2015, for most people it _is_ unique to web audio.
Generally speaking when someone wants to play audio on their computer it just
works.

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vortico
This is because "fancy, high definition, multi-channel audio" has >40ms
latency, so you cannot compare it with Web Audio, which is meant to be real
time like in digital music settings, where often <8ms is required. You clearly
do not understand the problem you are claiming to be simple.

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pjc50
How can web audio be realtime when it doesn't have a realtime scheduler? That
may be driving this problem: the browser's javascript engine not being
scheduled in time by the underlying operating system.

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J_Darnley
Is there a download available for offline listening?

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outputchannel
Hello, post author here, were you thinking about downloading the NASA sound
clip or the web audio recreation?

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J_Darnley
Either but originally I meant the recreation.

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outputchannel
Ok, no problem, I've uploaded both audio files to my SoundCloud account
([https://soundcloud.com/outputchannel](https://soundcloud.com/outputchannel))
and you can download them by clicking the download button beneath the waveform
display.

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J_Darnley
Neat and thanks.

