Audio Player and Local Web Server - Changes to the dev environment

[AaronDavidNewman]

Up until now, Smoosic has been something that can just be run from a local html file. This is convenient, but it creates some limitations when dealing with audio and fonts. Browsers protect a lot of the best features from being used locally, for security reasons.

To address this, I think the time has come to add a local browser to the Smoosic development environment. This will allow us to bring the audio and rendering performance to the next level. Our current audio playback involves transposing a few MP3 samples in real time. It sounds and performs rather bad! But web audio has really evolved lately - it seems like the open-source software is catching up with the technology.

To accomplish this, we'll have to add some new dependencies.

It seems like similar projects use either Vite or some framework built on expressjs. I looked at these, Vite I think is just too opinionated for us to easily incorporate such a mature project as Smoosic. Raw expressjs is very simple, and seems to work with the audio player right out of the box.

Rather than provide individual samples, I'd like to take advantage of some of the sound-font based projects that are out there. Right now I am looking at: smplr

This seems pretty robust, and the audio player could almost drop right into Smoosic, in terms of the way our 'SmoOscillator' class works now.

Other the npm install, I think the only cost will be starting the web server before running Smoosic locally. I think this will not affect GitHub pages, since that is already served over https.

This may be happening as early as this weekend!

Thanks for listening! Share your thoughts...
Aaron

[AaronDavidNewman]

I have incorporated with the smplr project. And we now use nextjs as a web server. You can still open the html directly, for now, but it will work better with the local server. To use:

npm install
npm run build
npm run server

then connect to http://localhost:3000/html/smoosic.html#