Rehowl - React 18 support

Note: All below is just from the old version 0.6.0. That version did not allow react 17/18, probably due to storybook didn't support later react versions than 16.

Rehowl

An opinionated React wrapper for howler.js

• Rehowl
  • Installation
  • Documentation and Live Examples
  • Quick start
  • Rationale

Installation

Rehowl has react and howler as peer dependencies so that you can manage your own versions.

npm install --save-dev howler rehowl

yarn add -D howler rehowl

Documentation and Live Examples

Documentation and live examples are available at https://tedmor.in/rehowl

The source of these examples is ./stories

Quick start

It's recommended to view the examples.

However, at its core Rehowl works by using useHowl or <Howl /> to get a howl instance, then playing sounds off that instance with one or more <Play /> components:

import { useHowl, Play } from 'rehowl'
import bark from './assets/bark.mp3'

const Autoplay = () => {
  const { howl, state } = useHowl({ src: bark })
  return (
    <Play howl={howl} />
  )
}

See the docs for examples on how to play multiple sounds off of one howl, how to use audio sprites, and how to control volume, seek, etc.

Rationale

When deciding to use Howler in a React project, a quick Google Search brings you to react-howler.

There are a few issues that make ReactHowler unsuitable for my needs:

• No support for playing multiple sounds on one Howl instance
• No support for audio sprites
• If you want to do more than the very basic API, you must break out the howler instance using refs
• Use of componentWillReceiveProps

Overall, it feels much more like a barebones wrapper for Howler that doesn't really give you any help when trying to integrate it into your components.

My main goals in this project are to make a library that feels like Howler, if Howler were built for React.