Quick guide to implementing the HTML5 audio tag

Ernest Delgado
Ernest Delgado

Step 1: Wrap your Flash object with the audio tag

Those browsers that don't recognize the audio tag will load the Flash content instead.

<audio>
</span><span class="old">
    <object class="playerpreview" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
            data="player_mp3_mini.swf" width="200" height="20">
      <param name="movie" value="player_mp3_mini.swf" />
      <param name="bgcolor" value="#085c68" />
      <param name="FlashVars" value="mp3=test.mp3" />
      <embed href="player_mp3_mini.swf" bgcolor="#085c68" width="200"
             height="20" name="movie" align=""
             type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="mp3=test.mp3">
      </embed>
    </object>
</span><span class="new">
</audio>

Step 2: Add the source reference

We can add as many "source" lines and formats as we want. If the browser doesn't support one specific format it will fallback to the next one and so forth.

<span class="old"><audio></span>
  <span class="new"><source src="test.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" />
  <source src="test.ogg" type="audio/ogg" /></span><span class="old">

  <object class="playerpreview" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
          data="player_mp3_mini.swf" width="200" height="20">
    <param name="movie" value="player_mp3_mini.swf" />
    <param name="bgcolor" value="#085c68" />
    <param name="FlashVars" value="mp3=test.mp3" />
    <embed href="player_mp3_mini.swf" bgcolor="#085c68" width="200"
           height="20" name="movie" align=""
           type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="mp3=test.mp3">
    </embed>
  </object>

</audio></span>

Step 3: Add fallback to Flash

To be safe, we need to add the fallback to a Flash audio player, in case the browser doesn't support any of the formats we specified. For instance, Firefox 3.5 only supports the audio tag with Ogg format, but we might only have the mp3 file available.

<span class="old"><audio></span>
<span class="new"><source src="test.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" /></span><span class="old">

<object class="playerpreview" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
        data="player_mp3_mini.swf" width="200" height="20">
<param name="movie" value="player_mp3_mini.swf" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#085c68" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="mp3=test.mp3" />
<embed href="player_mp3_mini.swf" bgcolor="#085c68" width="200"
        height="20" name="movie" align=""
        type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="mp3=test.mp3">
</embed>
</object>

</audio>
</span><span class="new">
<div id="player_fallback"></div>
<script>
if (document.createElement('audio').canPlayType) {
if (!document.createElement('audio').canPlayType('audio/mpeg')) {
    swfobject.embedSWF(
    "player_mp3_mini.swf",
    "player_fallback",
    "200",
    "20",
    "9.0.0",
    "",
    {"mp3":"test.mp3"},
    {"bgcolor":"#085c68"});
}
}
</script></span>

To make it easier, we are using the SWFObject library to insert the Flash player via JavaScript. To include the library you can simply use the Google AJAX Libraries API inserting these two lines in your header:

<span class="new"><script src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>google.load("swfobject", "2.2");</script></span></pre>

Step 4: Add the default controls to show the player

These controls are not customizable (see examples at the end). Since these default controls will show up regardless of the supported format we will need to handle its visibility with the conditional we previously created.

// TODO: DevSite - Code sample removed as it used inline event handlers

Alternatively, you can create your own player using JavaScript and CSS.

// TODO: DevSite - Code sample removed as it used inline event handlers