[whatwg] Background audio channels

[James Ross]

> Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:57:44 -0700
> From: wjohnston at mozilla.com
> To: public-html at w3.org; whatwg at whatwg.org
> Subject: [whatwg] Background audio channels
>
> Note: This is all based rather loosely on the AudioChannels implementation written for B2G recently [1]. It includes a few other use-cases on its wiki page, along with definitions of additional channels to accomadate them. I've been trying to simplify it down to handle the most common use cases. Finding the correct terminology here is difficult though. For instance, it seems likely that games will see the background channel and think its an appropriate place to play game background music, the exact type of audio you'd like to have paused when you leave the game. Ideas for better ways to describe it are welcome.
>
> [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/AudioChannels

For comparison, Windows 8 defines msAudioCategory (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh767375) with similar channels to the B2G list, but also a separate msAudioDeviceType (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh767376) which specifies which device to output to (console - not sure what this means, multimedia, communications).

-- 
James Ross silver at warwickcompsoc.co.uk