How to get back src after passing to howler function?

Question

I have a slider that has a range corresponding to values of an element of my array. For each step along the range, I would like to have howler play the song that corresponds to that value. The .mp3 for each song is accessed via a url that is in the array. I have verified that the urls work correctly. The array is called demosongs and it looks like this:

0: {danceability: 0.01, preview_url: 'somewebsiteaddress1.com'}
1: {danceability: 0.21, preview_url: 'somewebsiteaddress2.com'}
2: {danceability: 0.47, preview_url: 'somewebsiteaddress3.com'}
3: {danceability: 0.62, preview_url: 'somewebsiteaddress4.com'}
4: {danceability: 0.89, preview_url: 'somewebsiteaddress5.com'}

So, for example, if my slider is in the 3rd position, I want to play the song at the link: 'somewebsiteaddress3.com' and if I switch the slider to the 5th position, I want 'somewebsiteaddress3.com' to stop playing and 'somewebsiteaddress5.com' to start playing instead.

I have set up a function that gets the value of the slider and uses that to get the url to the sound file that should be played. I then pass that url to the howler function that should be storing all of the information that it needs into a variable called sound. When I try to pass the variable sound back to the previous function, the sound variable has lost the url. The code looks like this:

let sound = getsongtoplay();

function getval(){
  thesong = demosongs[(slider.value)-1];
  soundurl = thesong["preview_url"];
  getsongtoplay(soundurl);
  sound.play();


function getsongtoplay(soundurl){
  var sound = new Howl({
    src: [soundurl],
    format: ['mp3'],
    autoplay: false,
    loop: false,
    volume: 0.5,
  });
  console.log(sound);
  return sound;
};

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm new to howler and haven't used javascript in quite awhile but would like to become proficient in both howler and javascript, in general.

Answer 1

Okay, so I think this means that I need to take a break. I just forgot to ask for sound when I called the getsoundtoplay function. So, it should look like this:

function getval(){
  thesong = demosongs[(slider.value)-1];
  soundurl = thesong["preview_url"];
  sound = getsongtoplay(soundurl);
  sound.play();


function getsongtoplay(soundurl){
  var sound = new Howl({
    src: [soundurl],
    format: ['mp3'],
    autoplay: false,
    loop: false,
    volume: 0.5,
  });
  console.log(sound);
  return sound;
};

If no one minds, I'll leave this here for other howler/js newbies.