Best way to play wav files in the browser?

Question

I have no choice but to play wav files directly in the browser (serverside encoding to mp3 isn't an option, unfortunately.)

What's the best way to do this? I'd really like to take advantage of the HTML 5 audio tag but my target audience includes many, many teens using IE6. As far as I'm aware flash isn't an option, but speedy playback really is critical.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Nowadays, the best way is probably just to use the HTML5 <audio> tag. In the past, you might have done it like this:

Background:

<embed src="bgsound.wav" hidden="true" autostart="true" loop="1">

On Click:

<a href="success.wav">Play Sound</a>

Answer 2

It's been a few years since the last answer. Embed tag was good but I had an issue trying to trigger it to play in JavaScript. New audio tag works well is most browsers.

<audio src="cat9.wav" preload></audio>

You can trigger it manually with audioElement.play()

Answer 3

<audio controls="controls"><source src="http://blablabla.com/hghghgh/my%20file.wav" type="audio/x-wav" /></audio>

Due to unfixed bug (issue from 2012 year?) sometimes Chromium-like browsers cannot play .wav from redirected URLs because they "think" that file size is zero. But .mp3 is OK.

Opera 12.14 and Firefox play from < audio > tag normally in the same case (redirected URL).

I tried JPlayer's 2.9.* lib in Drupal 7 with 3 players, but not successful (was black inactive rectangle 300*14 pixels for each player).