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Comment by catshirt | Hacker News Reader

i mean, of course events are going to fire like mad. welcome to the world of audio processing. :)

MediaRecorder works the same way (but for MediaStreamSources, not BufferSources).

the idea is that audio buffers are processed in chunks- an event fires for each chunk that is processed. the act of "recording" is just reassembling these chunks into a single ArrayBuffer.

edit: seems like Recorderjs works exactly this way (but implements features more than just recording, like exporting as WAV).

capturing the chunks: https://github.com/mattdiamond/Recorderjs/blob/master/src/re...

reassembling the chunks: https://github.com/mattdiamond/Recorderjs/blob/master/src/re...

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> if (!this.recording) return;

This is the key I was missing in my implementation. Another challenge is wiring this up to multiple OscillatorNodes - the docs say a ScriptProcessorNode can only have one input. In my implementation I create a new OscillatorNode whenever you press a key.

In Acid Machine, I have created a kind of virtual 4 channel mixer, that is the only thing that connects directly to the main destination output. All osc nodes that are generated by an instrument get connected to the instruments master gain node, then that connects to one of the mixer channels. All mixer channels then connect to a master mixer gain, then the output.

If you do it that way, you just need to attach the recorder to the master output of the mixer.

yep--

it's also decent practice to send your oscillators into a mixer anyway so that they can be rerouted at large.

for instance, say you have 4 oscillators, 2 fx buses and an output. you route (4 oscillators) -> mixer -> fx bus 1 -> output. then if you want to switch the fx bus for your oscillators, you can just reroute the mixer instead of each oscillator individually.

in the case of a recorder, you'd want the end of your entire graph to look like this: mixer -> recorder -> output. this way your recorder is capturing all audio (oscillators, effects, etc). (and, as noted above, you have the option to reroute the mixer directly to the output when it's not recording).

Thanks for the advice! What node would be a mixer in WebAudio?

My mixer channels are a gain node (for input), followed by 2 gain nodes - which are used as fx slots and replaced when an effect is added, the last fx slot connects to another gain node (for channel output) - that then connects to the mixer master gain node.

You could have it as simple as 1 gain node for each channel which you use for input and output to the mixer master gain. This would make it difficult to add fx later though.

if all you're trying to do is combine nodes in the graph a gain node is standard. (that is, you can connect any number of oscillators to a single gain).

Great thanks. But throughout this project I've been wondering: why can't I buffer a damn oscillator (or gain) node?

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