David Humphrey and the hit squad of audio gurus have some new amazing demos for us. Perfect for a Friday. This is all through the rich Mozilla Audio API work which will hopefully be pushed into other browsers at some point in the not so distant future.
Charles Cliffe has some awesome WebGL visualizations from Audio. [...]

Scott Schiller, the best moustache-d frontend engineer around, has updated his awesome SoundManager library. The latest SoundManager 2 version now comes with free HTML5 Audio support which makes it a HTML5 Audio()-capable JavaScript Sound API, backwards-compatible via Flash fallback for MP3/MP4 formats. Existing SM2 API seamlessly uses HTML5 where supported, currently experimental; and of course… [...]

Elias Majic and Spencer Lord have guest authored this post on speech recognition in JavaScript. Do you have something to share? Consider your own guest post and contact us!
Recently Google’s free text to speech api has made the rounds. The reverse is also possible, converting speech to text.
With speechapi.com’s javascript API, it is [...]

David Friedman calls is “silly”, but he has created something simple and fun in his new form of volume control that moves from whisper to shout as you change the volume.

The code (which works on Firefox and Opera right now) uses different tracks for each level:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:

<audio id=”apA” autobuffer=”true” onTimeUpdate=”update();”>

        <source src=”ogg/Volume1.ogg” [...]

The HTML5 specification introduces the and media elements, and with them the opportunity to dramatically change the way we integrate media on the web. The current HTML5 media API provides ways to play and get limited information about audio and video, but gives no way to programatically access or create such media. We [...]

Above shows the work of some awesome developers. Alistair MacDonald, David Humphrey, Thomas Saunders and Corban Brook have collectively done some great forward looking work with audio sampling and JavaScript. You have to use a custom build of Firefox to make it work right now, but listen to the story of how this came about. [...]

The doctor is in, and this time the specialist is Mark Boas who walks us through HTML5 Audio in various browsers and how to get audio working on the various implementations that are in the wild today.
This early in the game especially, all implementations are not equal. For one there is the codec support:

But also [...]

Brian Arnold created a fun sample drum machine simulator using HTML5 <audio>.
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

function playBeat() {

        if (isPlaying) {

                var nextBeat = 60000 / curTempo / 4;

                // Turn off all lights on the tracker’s row

        [...]

Scott Schiller has updated his popular SoundManager 2 library to include new functionality made possible by Flash 9, such as:

* Full-screen MPEG-4 video (HE-AAC/H.264) and audio support
* “MultiShot” play (layered/chorusing effects)
* Waveform/frequency spectrum data
* Peak (L/R channel volume) [...]

Eric Wahlforss, the founder of SoundCloud, wrote in to tell us about “The Cloud Player“, a iTunes / Songbird clone written entirely in Ajax:

we just released an open-source itunes-clone built in jquery (and app engine, soundmanager 2, soundcloud api), complete with smart playlists, drag’n’drop, keyboard shortcuts, load-as-you-scroll playlists, playlist sharing, waveform display of tracks, etc. [...]