Chrome 14 released with Web Audio API specification

Chrome 14 is now available for you to update, which interestingly includes the imeplementation of Google's new Web Audio API. It's a draft-status standard proposal authored by Google through the W3C, enabling rich audio processing in Web applications. What this means for game developers is to mix sound sources in 3D space, among other things.

If you're interested in learning more about this API, Google has demonstrations available online illustrating its capabilities.

"Today, we’re happy to ship a new release to the Stable channel of Chrome, following up on last month’s Beta channel release. This release contains two significant technologies which allow developers to create even more powerful web apps and games:

• The Web Audio API enables developers to add fancy audio effects such as room simulation and spatialization.
• Native Client is an open-source technology which allows C and C++ code to be seamlessly and securely executed inside the browser. Currently, Native Client only supports applications listed in the Chrome Web Store, but we are working to remove this limitation as soon as possible.

"This release also contains some changes for our Chrome users on Mac OS X Lion. For all web pages, Chrome uses Lion's overlay scrollbars, which appear only while you’re scrolling. We’ve also added initial support for Lion’s full-screen mode, triggered by a full-screen button or Ctrl+Shift+F. Finally, we’ve fixed many crash bugs, and added some all-around visual polish.

"As always, if you already have Chrome installed, it will automatically update itself to the new version soon. If you haven’t taken Chrome for a spin yet, you can download it from www.google.com/chrome."

A new Stable release of Chrome, expanding the frontiers of the web [Chrome Blog]