Formats and Browser Support

Even more so than with video, audio should always be offered in multiple formats.

Audio Formats

Best included self-hosted audio formats:

  • MP3: Good quality for file size, but proprietary.
  • OGG Audio: Open-sourced.
  • Wav*: Lossless, but larger files.

Audio files can be rendered to many file formats. The most popular and well-known is likely .mp3.

This is because the compression achieved creates smaller file sizes without comprising audio quality too greatly. However, .mp3 is technically a proprietary format, and as such, some people are hesitant to use it.

If you find yourself working for an audio-based client, they may also have strong opinions about what file types they want prioritized. For example, they may want to use .ogg as this is an open-source based audio format.

*Your clients may also insist that you include lossless or uncompressed audio file formats such as .wav, .aiff, or .flac.

“Not Supported!”

Notice that the <audio> element is not an “empty element” and requires both an opening and closing tag. This serves a number of purposes, but the most important is that the developer can include content between the tags that will be displayed or called in the case that an end-user’s browser does not support the <audio> element or audio file format.

You should always include extra markup inside the tags for this potential case.

HTML
<audio src="#" preload controls>
  <p>A quick description of the song...</p>
  <p>Sorry, your browser does not support our audio format.</p>
</audio>