Show HN: Recreate NASA's Apollo Space Beeps (Quindar Tones) with Web Audio

backwardm 10 years ago |

Pretty neat! I've heard those beeps a lot but never knew what they were for. Also, is it me, or do the sounds in the example recording sound the same? (frequency-wise?)

outputchannel 10 years ago | |

Thanks! Listening to the recording, I'm reasonably sure I can distinguish the two different frequencies, but there's no denying they sound very similar. They're so close there's less than a semitone between them.

vortico 10 years ago |

The tape recordings of Apollo sound a few dozen Hz lower than the web audio version. Is this because of an inconsistent tape driver?

InclinedPlane 10 years ago |

Wow, this really made me realize how crappy the state of web audio is today.

Excellent work otherwise though.

vortico 10 years ago | |

Why is it crappy? You create a sine oscillator, connect it to output, and call .play(). Or are you referring to issues not addressed in this article?

InclinedPlane 10 years ago | | |

The output quality is terrible, very crackly (on chrome and firefox). I don't see any reason for that in the code so I assume it's just due to the way web audio is in general. I can understand why it isn't used more often.

pippy 10 years ago | | |

it sounds your processor can't keep up with your sound buffer. you can start Google chrome up with --audio-buffer-size=2048 to increase it

All audio technologies have buffer issues, it's a pretty basic problem. it's not unique to web audio.

djrogers 10 years ago | | |

> it sounds your processor can't keep up with your sound buffer

Is this 1994? We've been playing fancy, high definition, multi-channel audio on our computers for decades now, and it's been ages since I've seen it impact the CPU.

> All audio technologies have buffer issues, it's a pretty basic problem. it's not unique to web audio.

I would say that in 2015, for most people it is unique to web audio. Generally speaking when someone wants to play audio on their computer it just works.

vortico 10 years ago | | |

This is because "fancy, high definition, multi-channel audio" has >40ms latency, so you cannot compare it with Web Audio, which is meant to be real time like in digital music settings, where often <8ms is required. You clearly do not understand the problem you are claiming to be simple.

InclinedPlane 10 years ago | | |

Nope, that's not it, makes no difference.

Saying that all audio technologies have issues is a dodge. Technology is hard, software is about dealing with problems not about passing the buck and saying "sorry it sucks, it's hard and I gave up". Computer audio isn't exactly rocket science, tons of products get it right, browser makers just can't be bothered to invest in it.

TeMPOraL 10 years ago | | |

> Computer audio isn't exactly rocket science

Ironic, in the context of this article.

J_Darnley 10 years ago |

Is there a download available for offline listening?

outputchannel 10 years ago | |

Hello, post author here, were you thinking about downloading the NASA sound clip or the web audio recreation?

J_Darnley 10 years ago | | |

Either but originally I meant the recreation.

outputchannel 10 years ago | | |

Ok, no problem, I've uploaded both audio files to my SoundCloud account (https://soundcloud.com/outputchannel) and you can download them by clicking the download button beneath the waveform display.

J_Darnley 10 years ago | | |

Neat and thanks.