High memory usage?

[fa-sharp]

Hi there,

First of all, great library! Super fun and easy to work with. In my app, I create three different Soundfont player instances (piano, bass, and drums to imitate a jazz band) and I noticed in the Chrome task manager that the memory usage goes up by ~600-700 MB after instantiation. This seems like quite a lot, given that the sample audio files themselves are only a couple MBs total. Is this expected?

Although from scouring the internet, it sounds like maybe high memory usage might be expected due to how the Web Audio API works, i.e. decompressing the audio? I'm just not super familiar with what's going on under the hood to know what to expect here. Curious to hear if others have the same experience. Thank you!

[danigb]

Yes, due how web audio works, the only way to play audio samples is by decoding them beforehand. We could improve this situation by loading less samples (only from the regions we plan to use). However, this features is currently not implemented and I have no plans to implement it soon. But I'm open to PRs ;-)

[fa-sharp]

Ah I see. In the case of the Soundfont player, does that mean selecting a range of notes to load, e.g. C4-C5? Or does it mean being able to precisely load the individual notes that are needed?