Alternative audio decoders

[katspaugh]

WebAudio decoder is very memory intensive and cannot easily be done in chunks (there’s a library that does it but only for mp3s).

We could explore and profile alternatives like this wasm-based set of decoders: https://github.com/eshaz/wasm-audio-decoders

[prakharpbuf]

We could create our own wasm port of ffmpeg or use one of the existing ones:
https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm
https://github.com/Kagami/ffmpeg.js

[sundayz]

I'm pretty sure that emscripten ports of ffmpeg are too big to realistically use in a browser app, unless you want to include a 10MB dependency on top of everything else in your app. I don't know about the wasm version, but I assume it's also pretty big.

[prakharpbuf]

it is pretty big indeed

[katspaugh]

In the project I linked, each decoder seems to be 60-70 Kb.
Of course, ffmpeg has the advantage of supporting all possible formats.

[sundayz]

It would be neat to have a plugin or maybe a backend (when we implement an AudioBackend interface) that can use ffmpeg, but it would have to be optional and loaded on-demand rather than part of the wavesurferjs bundle.

[thijstriemstra]

We could create our own wasm port of ffmpeg

my gosh, you have any idea how much work that is?