Audio on the Web

HTML5 provides a standard for playing audio.

Until now, there has never been a standard for playing audio on a web page.

Today, most audio are played through a plugin (like flash).

However, not all browsers have the same plugins.

HTML5 specifies a standard way to include audio, with the audio element.

The audio element can play sound files, or an audio stream.

Audio Formats

Currently, there are 3 main formats for the audio element:

Format	IE 9	Firefox 3.5	Opera 10.5	Chrome 3.0	Safari 3.0
Ogg Vorbis	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
MP3	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Wav	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

How It Works:

To play an audio file in HTML5, this is all you need:

<audio src="song.ogg" controls="controls"> </audio>

The control attribute is for adding play, pause, and volume controls.

Insert content between the <audio> and </audio> tags for browsers that do not support the audio element:

Example <audio src="song.ogg" controls="controls"> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio>

The example above uses an Ogg file, and will work in Firefox, Opera and Chrome.

To make the audio work in Internet Explorer and Safari, add an audio file of the type MP3.

The audio element allows multiple source elements. Source elements can link to different audio files. 

The browser will use the first recognized format:

Example <audio controls="controls">   <source src="song.ogg" type="audio/ogg" />   <source src="song.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" /> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio>

HTML5 audio Tags

Tag	Description
<audio>	Defines sound content
<source>	Defines multiple media resources for media elements, such as <video> and <audio>