Pixi-Sound vs Howler

[frankieboywonder]

Hello, I was talking to a dev the other day who was saying that after evaluating both Howler and Pixi-Sound had come to the conclusion that Pixi-Sound was the better choice for the audio management in his games.

I didn't really have time to quiz him about the reasoning behind this statement so was just curious to see if anyone else had evaluated both these libraries and made any conclusions based on something stronger than the 'neatness' of just using it because you also use Pixi!

We could switch out the library in our games but it would be a day or two's work so just looking for a good reason! :-)

Thanks in advance.

[ivan.popelyshev]

Pixi libs have certain level of community support. If you want to pester @bigtimebuddy and post him new bugs, move to pixi-sound.

[GoldFire]

I'm the author of howler.js and it has quite a bit of community support as well. You'll find that howler.js is the most widely used JS audio library and has been under constant development for many years. We use it in our own web games (CasinoRPG and Exocraft.io) and it is used widely elsewhere. A small list of sites/games using howler: https://howlerjs.com/showcase/.

[themoonrat]

Both are great options!

The main advantage of Howler is it's wider use. I use it, and love it, and feel more secure in using it because so many devs do too. The main downside is fitting it into the Pixi loading process. Even if you download audio as a blob, you still need to account in your preloading process for passing it to Howler for it to be decoded.

The main advantage for Pixi Sound is that it covers this integration for you. In production code, it's easier to get up and running. And the syntax and use is all very familiar because it was made by a Pixi Dev. 

But that's not saying Pixi Sound is not reliable, it is! And it's not saying Howler is hard to use... it really isn't. Both are great options with active and receptive maintainers.

[ivan.popelyshev]

2 hours ago, GoldFire said:

I'm the author of howler.js and it has quite a bit of community support as well. You'll find that howler.js is the most widely used JS audio library and has been under constant development for many years. We use it in our own web games (CasinoRPG and Exocraft.io) and it is used widely elsewhere. A small list of sites/games using howler: https://howlerjs.com/showcase/.

Thans for showing up here! Now I can make complete sarcastic answer: "choose the guy you pester about bugs, @GoldFire or @bigtimebuddy."  I personally think that its very hard to choose based on tech or features there. Its not like pixi-sound have distinct super-algorithm somewhere in the code.

[botmaster]

I made my own, it's actually more fun (and not that hard) to do and you have complete control and I implemented sound streaming which doesn't seem available anywhere.

Note that while all those public framework claim support for IE they always forget to say in IE you will have a lot less features available since there's no WebAudioAPI on IE

[GoldFire]

2 hours ago, botmaster said:

I made my own, it's actually more fun (and not that hard) to do and you have complete control and I implemented sound streaming which doesn't seem available anywhere.

Note that while all those public framework claim support for IE they always forget to say in IE you will have a lot less features available since there's no WebAudioAPI on IE 

Howler.js doesn't claim that at all. The core howler.js library has full feature parity regardless of Web Audio API or HTML5 Audio. We then have optional plugins that give you extra features only available in Web Audio API. Also, simply making your own and doing it right is a lot more work than you might think as there are a lot of browser-specific edge cases you have to cover, and there is pretty much no way to test for all of those on your own without a community effort.

[botmaster]

I see, that's an interesting approach. Due to the specific needs of our applications we had to take the opposite road and develop full WebAudioAPI features and then degrade as gracefully as possible on IE. Our market is 70% Chrome and 15% IE and then the rest and our tester team is always providing good feedbacks on our sound API so our sound api is pretty solid and we can always update on the fly if needed. 

[takopus]

Don't want to start new topic, will try here. I've been trying to use PixiJS Sound library and it looks and works extremely well, up until the point where I failed to find any kind of seek() method or any other way to set playback position. Is it really so or am I missing something? Thanks in advance!

[botmaster]

Not familiar with PIXI sound library but the WebAudio API does allow seek so if PIXI sound doesn't expose that type of method you should be able to tweak it to do it. The WebAudio API is really one of the best I've seen in years in any technology. There's isn't much you cannot do with it.