Streams implementation

[rodrigourbinaiq]

A streams implementation will be great!

[jankarres]

Excuse my late reply, please.

I don't see any use case where streams in node-lame would help me. If you want to implement streams as an alternative to promises I'm looking forward to your pull request :)

[mnebuerquo]

A use case for streams:

User is uploading recorded audio to send to google speech to transcribe as text.

1. User device is IOS or Android, using react native. That is uploading an audio file (originally m4a on IOS).
2. Server is Koa, and accepts a streaming upload as the request body (no multipart, just binary).
3. Server wants to pipe ctx.req to the Google speech client. Unfortunately the encoding of the audio isn't what Google expects.

I want to insert a step 2a, in which ctx.req is piped to a transform which converts the audio format to a format Google accepts, then the transformed output is piped to the Google speech client.

The reason streams are important is that the server may not have a huge amount of memory or disk to work with. By streaming, we don't have to store the whole audio file in memory or on disk at once. This is even more important with many simultaneous requests.

[tombburnell]

Streams would be very useful for on-the-fly transcoding to avoid user having to wait for transcoding to buffer before downloading.

[YakovL]

I'd second the request (the use case is conversion of a big mp3 to wav and streaming it further to a sound recongnition library that uses streams). I wasn't sure if this is possible, but it seems it is, at least frame-by-frame (but I don't know yet whether a file typically consists of just one frame or many, i.e. does this provide enough fragmentation to do any real streaming)