Exploring the world of audio Tags and elements in HTML5

Audio Tags and Elements in HTML5

Sound plays a very crucial role in our daily life. We just cant imagine a world without sounds. Not even in humans but sound plays vital role in animals life too, think of the croaking sound of toads, chirping of birds, barking of dogs etc. When we have turned every real world entity to interact with our digital world why should this property remain undiscovered, here HTML5 comes to the rescue, It includes a variety of sound formats and audio properties to be included in a static page that it seems more lively than simply static one infact these tags are as easy to handle as other tags in HTML. Let's explore this tag in HTML5.

Using audio tag:

Step 1 : Open any HTML editor (ex. visual studio, Notepad etc) and in the source code page (page where you want to write the HTML code) type the following lines.

To include multiple audio files use the following lines

<audio controls="controls" >
        <source src="song1.mp3" type="audio/mp3" />
        <source src="song2.wma" type="audio/wma" />
        <source src="song3.wav" type="audio/x-wav" />
</audio>

Step 2 : Now before previewing the output in the browser you need to check whether the format that you include for multiple formats of audio files in your browser support all the tags. see the figure
below to know which format is supported by which browser.

Step 3 : I have IE7 so I'll preview the output in this browser also if your browser doesn't support this format then the output will be a blank page otherwise the page looks like this:

Properties of the <audio></audio> tag:

Preload property : This property allows the user to extract the best experience from the browser. It specifies if and how the user thinks that the audio should be loaded when the page loads.

This property is of three values

1. none : This value is used when the user thinks that the browser should load the entire audio file when the page loads.
2. metadata : The user thinks that the browser should load only metadata when the page loads.
3. auto : The user thinks that the browser should NOT load the audio file when the page loads.

These property/attributes are used as below:

<audio controls="controls" >

        <source src="song1.mp3" type="audio/mp3" preload="none" />
</audio>

<audio controls="controls" >

        <source src="song2.ogg" type="audio/ogg"  preload="metadata" />       
</audio>

<audio controls="controls" >

        <source src="song3.aac" type="audio/aac" preload= "auto" />

</audio>

Other properties/attributes used in audio tag are:

Step 4 : Now to see the effect of these properties over the network while running the page press F5 to run the application and then on the IE output page press F12, then in the split screen that opens up go to cache--> check the option " Always refresh from server".

Step 5 : Write this line <source src="song1.mp3" type="audio/mp3" preload="none" /> and preview in the browser, Now go to network -->press "start capturing" button and then play the audio file in the web page. This opens up with a new screen which shows how much time the browser takes to load the audio file.

Step 5 : Write this line <source src="song1.mp3" type="audio/mp3" preload="metadata" /> and preview in the browser, Now go to network -->press "start capturing" button and then play the audio file in the web page. This opens up with a new screen which shows how much time the browser takes to load the audio file.

Step 5 : Write this line <source src="song1.mp3" type="audio/mp3" preload="auto" /> and preview in the browser, Now go to network -->press "start capturing" button and then play the audio file in the web page. This opens up with a new screen which shows how much time the browser takes to load the audio file.

Loop Property : This property allows the audio clip to clip forever until the clip is manually stoped or pused by the user. See the following line to know how to use this property.

<audio src="song1.mp3" type="audio/mp3" loop >
</audio>

To use loop in multiple audio tags write the following lines:

<body>
    <audio src="song1.mp3" type="audio/mp3" loop >
    </audio>
    <audio src="song2.mp3" type="audio/mp3" loop >
    </audio>
    <audio src="song3.mp3" type="audio/mp3" loop >
    </audio>
    <audio src="song4.mp3" type="audio/mp3" loop >
    </audio>
</body>

Conclusion : HTML5 is very sophisticated and user friendly language, soon all the browsers will be supporting this language and thus creating rich interactive user interfaces in web pages will be much more easy in the coming time.