// the find
joshwcomeau/use-sound
A React Hook for playing sound effects
A React hook that wraps Howler.js to add sound effects to web UIs with a declarative API. It's aimed at developers who want click sounds, hover feedback, or any other audio cue without wiring up Howler directly. The entire source is about 100 lines — it's a thin adapter, not a framework.
The API surface is genuinely small and well-designed — you get a play function and an escape hatch to the underlying Howl instance, which covers 95% of use cases without boxing you in. Sprite support is included out of the box, which matters if you're loading multiple short sounds and care about network requests. The async loading strategy (defers the Howler bundle until after first user interaction) is a smart fit for the browser autoplay restriction. TypeScript types are included and the delegated HookOptions pattern means you're never stuck waiting for a wrapper update to use a Howler feature.
The author explicitly calls this 'semi-maintained' in the README — that's honest, but it means edge-case bugs sit open indefinitely and you're basically adopting it as your own. The reactive configuration has a documented gotcha: playbackRate doesn't work reactively when using sprites, which is exactly when you'd want it. Async sound paths are explicitly unsupported, which rules out any app that loads audio URLs from an API. There are no tests in the repo at all — the stories serve as manual demos but nothing is automated, so confidence in correctness across React versions depends entirely on the author's judgment.