Recording Audio With Chrome Using HTML5

recording-audio-with-chrome

The Dubjoy project was stopped dead in its tracks when the newest version of the Google Chrome browser stopped using Adobe’s flash plugin and transitioned to their own called Pepper Flash. The aim of development was to produce a browser-based editor for translating the audio track of a video clip. After a bit of head scratching and a lot of research they decided to try ditching the use of Flash and implemented a way to record audio using HTML5.

There were quite a few issues along the way. The initial recording technique generated raw audio files, which are not playable by Chrome’s HTML5 audio player. This can be worked around by buffering the raw audio, then converting it to a different format once the recording is finished. The user also needs to monkey with the Chromes flags to enable HTML5 audio. So they did get it working, but it’s not yet a smooth process.

We love seeing the neat stuff you can do with HTML5. One of our favorites is the use of a tablet’s accelerometer as a browser game controller.

[via Reddit]

11 thoughts on “Recording Audio With Chrome Using HTML5

  1. oh yes ! thats the reason why we everitime need faster computer to do things with the same anoying waiting like 10 years before with older computers…..audio recording/encoding/… in html 5 and javascript….that we need….

  2. Ditto that on why perpetuating the gobbling of computer power to give us the mediocre looking video and tinny scratchy nad just plain dull
    and lifeless sounding or the worst even is
    swosoohwarbly VBR encoding
    mushy sounding wood sticks on brass, etc..
    grumblre , bitch,…mutter..

    Back when I was running a 1 gig athlon w/256 of ram
    Win 98se
    an ATI all in wonder 32 meg of mem.
    time warner cable for innet.
    mepg video streamed just fine
    and always looked way better than Flash
    and Flash audio was horrible and can be difificult
    to understand and caused the stumbles and
    just swamped your computer ,
    Still by far the worst offender for hogging resources

    do we not yet have the bandwith
    and computer power to ditch ALL audio
    under say 8~900 kbs?
    Would really like to it go to wav audio.

    There’s NO such thing as “lossless compresion”
    You Can Not compress ones an zerors,
    You can only dicard them
    What your left with an audio version of a “connect the dots” drawing
    yeah the software can do a remarkabel job
    of filling in , rounding out based on much,
    very clever, inteligent study and code work.

    But it just never sounds right.
    yes I tryed monky, flacc
    (not impressed, and the names an oxymoron.)

    Please people ,do something to get back
    **Truethfully ** uncompressed audio
    so we who care about how things sound can buy some tunes again.
    That means buying (legaly), and not
    at robbery prices either.

    1. Err… yes there is a thing such as lossless compression, that recognizes patterns in the data. Wav->Flac->Wav = bit-for-bit identical. Are you trolling?

      Not that it isn’t getting ridiculous how much junk is being crammed into browsers now. Worse is that web designers keep using it, perpetuating the bloat.

      1. No trolling, just an aggravated rant.
        also, just my opinion, that what you mention about
        assumed repeated patterns is another part of my complaint.
        you threw away the data and then had software
        draw some averaged curve to fill in the space
        between the dots. ..Again!
        Yeah, I’m nit picking here, but I don’t like the sound of rebuilt or whatever we call it, audio.
        =
        Sorry that sometimes, I forget to look back
        in a timely manor,
        for any responses to my ramblings.
        =
        and apologies for my atrocious spelling, some of what I’m typing is sometimes outside of the little box and I can’t see the mess.
        Horizontal diplopia, means I have to force the browser to override the fonts and sizes , so sometimes that makes things messy.
        =
        and a BIG thanks to Hackaday
        for keeping a place
        to see all this stuff,
        regardless of how delighted or
        idiotically I may react to it.

          1. Oh come on. Everyone knows that when you zip up a text file you never get the same thing back. You cannot compress ones and zeroes after all…

            Or maybe audio is *magic* ones and zeroes?

        1. While it’s true that both lossy and lossless compression detect patterns and build a waveform to play back, the difference between lossy and lossless is that lossy formats match patterns that generally follow what’s going on in the sound, while lossless formats use patterns that can be rebuilt exactly as they went in. It’s like PNG or 7z for audio; it’s still smaller, but it can be reconstructed with 100% accuracy.

  3. oh god, not the pepper flash!! I have purposefully disabled pepflashplayer.dll in Chrome because flash video performance (youtube) on older hardware is abysmal, even on new hardware it’s a resource hog. I’m still using genuine flash till they prise it from my dead chrome://plugins page.

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