HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
katspaugh
wavesurfer.js
TypeScript2012–2021
katspaugh / wavesurfer.js

wavesurfer.js

Audio waveform player

4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Audio waveform player

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-06-06 19:42:33 UTC to 2021-06-17 20:42:48 UTC.

012012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
hi HN! I've been working in the browser audio domain recently and noticed to my surprise that WebAudio has no way to decode audio files efficiently. WebAudio has no support for partial decoding and can only decode entire audio files upfront which results in huge CPU and memory usage. For example, decoding a typical stereo 44.1 KHz 1-hour long audio file (e.g a podcast) into uncompressed floating point samples would consume (3600s * 44100Hz * 4 bytes * 2 channels) = ~1.27 GB of memory. Nice Obviously this isn't acceptable so I ended up creating this library to work around this issue. I ported FFmpeg over to WASM using Emscripten (a painful process) and then implemented an audio decoder with support for partial decoding. I hope this library can help anyone else with the same issue or at least serve as an additional reference for those look
Read the rest
ing to roll their own WASM-based workarounds. Thanks for taking a look! P.S: extra info/ranting about WebAudio below for those interested Others have already pointed out this glaring issue in the WebAudio API: https://github.com/WebAudio/web-audio-api/issues/1305 But it's sad to see that so many libraries/applications out there still rely on it such as: https://github.com/bbc/waveform-data.js https://github.com/katspaugh/wavesurfer.js Thankfully this issue should hopefully be addressed whenever WebCodecs is standardized and implemented: https://github.com/WICG/web-codecs/issues/28 But until then it's quite disappointing that developers have to go as far as rolling their own WASM-based solution just to work around the WebAudio API. I've heard unpleasant things about WebAudio and came in with zero expectations and yet was still disappointed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In Show HN: Decode audio files in the browser without insane memory usage

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.