The Joy of HTML5 Audio: Tips & Tricks for Easy Sound Embedding

Learn how to use the HTML audio element to embed sounds in your web pages easily. Lots of code examples are included in the tutorial.

Up to now, playing audio in a web browser has been a bit of a black art. Traditionally there are several ways to embed a sound in a web page — some work better than others, and many only work if you happen to be using the right browser with the right plugin.

The ubiquity of the Flash plugin has helped to a large extent, since Flash makes it easy to embed audio in a way that works with most browsers. However, this doesn't help with browsers such as Safari on the iPhone and iPad, which don't support Flash at all.

In short, it's all a bit of a mess.

Fortunately, HTML5 looks set to make life easier for us developers, thanks to its audio element. This element lets you embed an audio file in a web page, as well as control playback of the sound using JavaScript. More importantly, it doesn't require any plugin to work, and is supported by nearly all modern web browsers. (We'll come back to browser support later!)

In this tutorial I'll show you how to embed sounds in a page with the audio element. We'll also take a look at how to trigger and stop the audio via JavaScript, and how to ensure our audio can play on as many web browsers as possible.

The HTML5 audio element

The basic audio element is really easy to use. Since it's the season to be jolly — and Europe's getting more than its fair share of snow right now — let's embed a short MP3 snippet of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas":

<audio src="WhiteChristmas.mp3"></audio>

Not much explanation needed here! Much like the <img> tag lets you include an image file in a page, the <audio> tag includes an audio file.

Cross-browser support

Simple though the above example is, it won't work in many browsers. This is down to audio file formats.

Some browsers can play .mp3 files but not .ogg files, while other browsers can play .ogg files but not .mp3. Most browsers can play .wav files, but WAVs are uncompressed, resulting in large file sizes which are impractical for anything other than short audio snippets.

Here's a summary of current browser support for various audio formats:

What audio formats does your browser support? Find out with this handy test page.

As you can see from the table, the only practical way to provide cross-browser support for audio playback is to serve .mp3 files to those browsers that can play them, and .ogg files to the others.

<audio> 
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.mp3">
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.ogg">
</audio>

Of course, this does mean that you need to create both .mp3 and .ogg versions of your sound file (tools such as Audacity are handy for this), but it will give you good cross-browser support.

Older versions of Internet Explorer — that is, versions 7 and 8 — don't even support the audio element. However, we'll look at how to support these browsers later in the article.

Playing a sound automatically

While the above code embeds a sound file, it doesn't actually play it, so it's not much use on its own. If we want the sound to play automatically when the page has loaded, then we can add an autoplay attribute to the element:

<audio autoplay> 
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.mp3">
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.ogg">
</audio>

Adding player controls

While autoplay can be useful at times, it can also be annoying to have sounds or music start playing as soon as you view a page. A nicer approach is to add controls to the audio element so that the user can start and stop the audio themselves:

<audio controls> 
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.mp3">
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.ogg">
</audio>

Typically, this adds a horizontal control bar featuring a play/pause button, a timeline with draggable playhead, and a volume control, much like you see at the bottom of a YouTube video.

It's worth bearing in mind that the controls will look — and sometimes behave — differently in each browser. For example, there's no volume control on an iPhone, since the user can just use the hardware volume buttons.

Looping playback

Adding the loop attribute to the <audio> tag causes the audio to play endlessly:

<audio loop> 
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.mp3">
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.ogg">
</audio>

This can be useful for things like background music and sound effects in games.

Preload hinting

You can optionally use the preload attribute to give the browser a hint as to whether, and how, it should preload the audio file when the page loads. Preloading the audio file means it can play instantly when the user hits the "play" button, which is a nicer experience for the user.

Values for this attribute are:

none

The browser shouldn't bother preloading the audio file. Use this setting when you don't expect the audio to be played by most users, or when you want to conserve your server bandwidth as much as possible.

metadata

This is similar to none, except that you're telling the browser it's OK to load the audio file's metadata, such as its duration. Still, the browser should not preload the actual audio data.

auto

It's OK for the browser to preload the entire audio file, if it wants to.

For example:

<audio preload="metadata"> 
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.mp3">
  <source src="WhiteChristmas.ogg">
</audio>

Bear in mind that preload is just a hint. The browser can choose to ignore it and do what it wants!

Controlling playback with JavaScript

One of the nice things about HTML5 audio elements is that they're easy to control using JavaScript. The audio element provides many useful properties and methods — here are just a few:

play()

Start playback at the current playback position

pause()

Pause playback if the sound is currently playing

canPlayType(type)

Determine if the browser can play a particular media type or not

duration

The length of the sound clip, in seconds

currentTime

The current playback position, in seconds. You can also set this property to move the playback position.

Using some of the above properties and methods, we can create some rudimentary buttons to play, pause, and stop our music:

  <audio id="myTune">
    <source src="WhiteChristmas.mp3">
    <source src="WhiteChristmas.ogg">
  </audio>

  <button onclick="document.getElementById('myTune').play()">Play Music</button>
  <button onclick="document.getElementById('myTune').pause()">Pause Music</button>
  <button onclick="document.getElementById('myTune').pause(); document.getElementById('myTune').currentTime = 0;">Stop Music</button>

Supporting older versions of Internet Explorer

So far we've assumed that our user's browser supports the HTML5 audio element. Sadly, Internet Explorer 7 and 8 don't! (IE9 does, thankfully.) It would be nice to provide some sort of fallback for those users who are using IE7 or IE8.

A crude but effective way to do this is to use conditional comments to single out these browsers, and present them with an object element pointing to the sound file. The browser then usually displays an embedded controller, allowing the user to play, pause and rewind the music much like the HTML5 controller. Here's an example:

<div id="content">

  <div style="margin-bottom: 20px;">
    <button id="playButton" onclick="document.getElementById('myTune').play()">Play Music</button>
    <button id="pauseButton" onclick="document.getElementById('myTune').pause()">Pause Music</button>
    <button id="stopButton" onclick="document.getElementById('myTune').pause(); document.getElementById('myTune').currentTime = 0;">Stop Music</button>
  </div>

  <audio id="myTune" controls>
    <source src="WhiteChristmas.mp3">
    <source src="WhiteChristmas.ogg">
  </audio>

<!--[if lt IE 9]>

  <object id="myTuneObj" type="audio/x-mpeg" data="WhiteChristmas.mp3" autoplay="false" height="45">
    <param name="src" value="WhiteChristmas.mp3" />
    <param name="controller" value="true" />
    <param name="autoplay" value="false" />
    <param name="autostart" value="0" />
  </object>

  <script>
    document.getElementById('playButton').onclick = function() { document.getElementById('myTuneObj').play() };
    document.getElementById('pauseButton').onclick = function() { document.getElementById('myTuneObj').pause() };
    document.getElementById('stopButton').onclick = function() { document.getElementById('myTuneObj').stop() };
  </script>

<![endif]-->

</div>

The above example will work on all browsers that support HTML5 audio, and fall back to the object approach for IE7 and 8. Within the conditional comments, I've also remapped the click event handlers for the Play/Pause/Stop buttons so that they can control the audio object in IE7/8 (which, handily, provides play(), pause() and stop() methods).

Another approach is to fall back to a Flash audio player for IE7/8. Here's a good post that shows how to use the audio element with a free Flash player fallback.

Summary

In this tutorial you've seen just how easy it is to embed and play back audio files using HTML5. Not only is the audio element simple to use, it's also very customizable, plus you can easily control playback through JavaScript.

Want to find out more about HTML5 audio, and what it can do? Check the spec.

Although support is lacking in some browsers, such as older versions of Internet Explorer, it's perfectly possible to start using HTML5 audio — with fallbacks, if necessary — today.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and Merry Christmas to you!

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Responses to this article

13 responses (oldest first):

@stuseattle: Yep, that should do the trick

  <button onclick="document.getElementById('myTune').play()">Play Music</button>

  <img onclick="document.getElementById('myTune').play()" src="mybutton.png" alt="Speaker icon" title="Play Music">

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