Square waves are the best waves. Even-numbered harmonics are for losers.
It'll be a long time before we can run a DAW in the browser. We can barely run a DAW properly when it's written in C and asm. The javascript garbage collector will cause unsolvable latency problems as soon as you want to do anything interesting.
EDIT: Supersaw! http://jsfiddle.net/DJZLS/2/ Not actually very super, I didn't see the fine-detuning option. Unfortunately I have work to do...
You could make the same argument for video games. It doesn't have to be the console equivalent of a video game. It just has to be convincing enough that people use it and want to keep pushing it. As long as it's not the Farmville of audio I think interesting things will take shape and people will gradually deal with the problems that arise.
For audio synthesis one wants sample-accurate timing. At CD quality, a single sample is ~0.022 milliseconds. This is far beyond what's needed for games. However, looking at the API, the timing of events seems to be handled in native code, one simply schedules them in javascript. There are much cleverer people than me working on this, I should probably reserve judgement.
With conventional javascript the timing is complete nonsense. With the audio API you're right, timing is different and doesn't deal with the same millisecond convention as regular Javascript. Below is a really good talk I found and the gentleman speaking explains much of this better than I should attempt to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFsCG7v9Y4c
http://jsfiddle.net/DJZLS/1/
Square waves are the best waves. Even-numbered harmonics are for losers.
It'll be a long time before we can run a DAW in the browser. We can barely run a DAW properly when it's written in C and asm. The javascript garbage collector will cause unsolvable latency problems as soon as you want to do anything interesting.
EDIT: Supersaw! http://jsfiddle.net/DJZLS/2/ Not actually very super, I didn't see the fine-detuning option. Unfortunately I have work to do...