crackling sound when recording on linux/webkit/alsa

[runlow]

Expected behaviour: Pressing CapsLock or Ctrl+Space, then ASDF etc lets me input notes in real time and hear the notes the same way as when clicking when they are being typed.

Actual behaviour: Once you press a note in "piano mode" there's a very intrusive crackle on everything, it persists on everything (playback, clicking) until refreshing the page.

Steps to reproduce: Uninstall or disable the pulseaudio daemon Run a webkit browser on Linux Open BeepBox from the url, press CapsLock then ASDF Notice the loud crackle

Tried: Enabling pulseaudio - it works - but that interferes with other programs that run fine without it

Possible solutions tests and workarounds:

• I don't know for sure but it seems to me like something to do with buffering the audio frames. Maybe the piano mode feeds the sound system (alsa) real-time unbuffered audio frames and relies on there being a sound server running to sort out the underruns? Haven't looked into it yet. Maybe having an option in beepbox to use sound buffering when in "piano mode" is a way to go?
• I could make it a point to use pulseaudio from now on but all audio in the browser works fine without it, even when recording from the mic so it feels like a workaround. to make it worse pulseaudio crashes every once in a while for unrelated reasons

Didn't notice any relevant errors in the dev console.

If you have any ideas please let me know. Thanks in advance.

Edit: works as expected in firefox (no pulseaudio), running beepbox in firefox in another window as a workaround (ideally would like it to work with webkit browsers though)

[runlow]

Found a workaround that seems to work well for webkit browsers if you use alsa but not pulseaudio

In case anyone runs across the same issue do:

chromium --audio-buffer-size=512 --audio-process-high-priority

It requires a browser restart (make sure the process isn't running in the background with ps aux|grep chromium).

The nasty crackling when recording disappears completely and everything else seems to work OK

[Mid-The-Modder]

Note recording does bring low latency in order to precisely detect inputs on a midi keyboard. However, the main drawback of this is that audio quality is usually butchered with crackly noises, and this is reset to the default state upon the program restarting, in this case, the tab being refreshed.