SoundJS

SoundJS is a library that provides browsers with a JavaScript sound API that first tries audio files with native HTML5 Audio and falls back to Flash when necessary.

Specifically, the SoundJS API offers the ability to play the same sound file more than once at a time, even while the same sound is already playing. This is also known as multi-layering sounds.

Motivation:

SoundJS is specifically created for the Simple Game Framework HTML engine. HTML5 Audio is a nice idea, but the spec provides no multi-layering support, meaning a single <audio> instance can only play it's src once at a time. There's also the case where no native HTML5 Audio is supported, or the specific file type is not supported, and that's where Flash can come in behind the scenes.

Features:

• Provides a simple API to load sounds initially, and create play instances when the sound has enough data to start playing or has loaded completely.
• First attempts to use native HTML5 Audio to load and play back the sound.
• Falls back to Flash when HTML5 fails or is not implemented.
• Multi-layering loaded sounds, for multiple bullet shot sounds for example.
• Guarantees cross-browser support for MP3, OGG Vorbis, and uncompressed WAV! H.264 works on HTML5 browsers that support it (no Flash fallback yet).

Example Usage:

var shot = new Sound("shot.mp3");
shot.addEventListener("loaded", function() {
    function playShot() {
        shot.play();
    }
    playShot();
    setTimeout(playShot, 50);
    setTimeout(playShot, 234);
});

View the full API docs for the complete picture.

Building Flash Source and Minimizing JavaScript

A few dependencies are required in order to build the source code into a Flash compatible SWF, and minimize (Compile) the JavaScript source. Make sure that you have installed:

• HaXe 'haxe' compiler command
• Node.js 'node' command

Once the dependencies are met, you can simply run:

./compile

from the root directory. compile is a simple script written in JavaScript using Node.js as the interpreter. It first uses the Google Compiler web service to minimize the JavaScript code, then uses the haxe command line tool to compile the HaXe source into a Flash SWF file.

License

SoundJS incorporates some Flash libraries licensed under the LGPL license, SoundJS must be released as LGPL as well.

See the COPYING.LESSER file for full legal text.