Autoplay audio files on an iPad with HTML5

Question

I m trying to get an audio file to autoplay in Safari on an iPad   If I go to the page using Safari on my Mac  it s fine   On the iPad  autoplay does not work

User · Answer

I would like to also emphasize that the reason you cannot do this is a business decision that Apple made, not a technical decision. To wit, there was no rational technical justification for Apple to disable sound from web apps on the iPod Touch. That is a WiFi device only, not a phone that may incur expensive bandwidth charges, so that argument has zero merit for that device. They may say they are helping with WiFi network management, but any issues with bandwidth on my WiFi network is my concern, not Apple's.

Also, if what they really cared about was preventing unwanted, excessive bandwidth consumption, they would provide a setting to allow users to opt-in to web apps sounds. Also, they would do something to restrict web sites from consuming equivalent bandwidth by other means. But there are no such restrictions. A web site can download huge files in the background over and over and Apple could care less about that. And finally, I believe the sounds can be downloaded anyway, so NO BANDWIDTH IS ACTUALLY SAVED! Apple just does not allow them to play automatically without user interaction, making them unusable for games, which of course is their real intent.

Apple blocked sound because they started to notice that HTML5 apps can be just as capable as native apps, if not more so. If you want sound in Web Apps you need to lobby Apple to stop being anti-competitive like Microsoft. There is no technical problem that can be fixed here.

User · Answer

Try calling the  load   method before the  play   method on the audio or video tag    which will be HTMLAudioElement or HTMLVideoElement respectively  That was the only way it would work on the iPad for me

User · Answer

I handled this by attaching an event handler for all the events for which you are allowed to trigger audio to the body element which triggers any html audio elements with autoplay to play once   var mobile    iPad iPhone iPod android  test navigator userAgent   amp  amp   window MSStream  if  mobile           body   on  touchstart click doubleclick keydown   function                audio autoplay  autoplay     each              function                    this play                    this removeAttribute  autoplay

User · Answer

This seems to work    lt html gt   lt title gt  iPad Sound Test  - Auto Play  lt  title gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt   lt audio id  audio  src  mp3test mp3  controls  controls  loop  loop  gt   lt  audio gt   lt script type  text javascript  gt       window onload   function             var audioPlayer   document getElementById  audio            audioPlayer load            audioPlayer play                lt  script gt     lt  body gt   lt  html gt    See it in action here  http   www johncoles co uk ipad test 1 html  Archived   As of iOS 4 2 this no-longer works  Sorry

User · Answer

It seems to me that the answer to this question is  at least now  clearly documented on the Safari HTML5 docs   User Control of Downloads Over Cellular Networks  In Safari on iOS  for all devices  including iPad   where the user may be on a cellular network and be charged per data unit  preload and autoplay are disabled  No data is loaded until the user initiates it  This means the JavaScript play   and load   methods are also inactive until the user initiates playback  unless the play   or load   method is triggered by user action  In other words  a user-initiated Play button works  but an onLoad  play    event does not   This plays the movie   lt input type  button  value  Play  onClick  document myMovie play    gt   This does nothing on iOS   lt body onLoad  document myMovie play    gt

User · Answer

Have puzzled over this whilst developing a quick prototype web app under iOS4 2  dev build   Solution is actually quite simple  Note that you can t seem to already have the tag in your HTML page  you actually need to insert the tag into the document dynamically  note this example uses Prototype 1 7 for some extra Javascript snazziness    this soundFile   new Element  audio    id   audio-1   src   audio-1 mp3   controls        document body appendChild this soundFile   this soundFile load    this soundFile play      As you ve not set a controller  there shouldn t be any need to do anything tricksy with CSS to hide it   position it off-screen    This seems to work perfectly

User · Answer

UPDATE  This is a hack and it s not working anymore on IOS 4 X and above  This one worked on IOS 3 2 X   It s not true  Apple doesn t want to autoplay video and audio on IPad because of the high amout of traffic you can use on mobile networks  I wouldn t use autoplay for online content  For Offline HTML sites it s a great feature and thats what I ve used it for   Here is a  javascript fake click  solution  http   www roblaplaca com examples html5AutoPlay   Copy  amp  Pasted Code from the site    lt script type  text javascript  gt           function fakeClick fn                var  a       lt a href     id  fakeClick  gt  lt  a gt                      a bind  click   function e                        e preventDefault                        fn                                        body   append  a                var evt                   el       fakeClick   get 0                if  document createEvent                    evt   document createEvent  MouseEvents                    if  evt initMouseEvent                        evt initMouseEvent  click   true  true  window  0  0  0  0  0  false  false  false  false  0  null                       el dispatchEvent evt                                                  el  remove                         function                 var video       someVideo   get 0                fakeClick function                     video play                                          lt  script gt     This is not my source  I ve found this some time ago and tested the code on an IPad and IPhone with IOS 3 2 X

User · Answer

Autoplay doesn t work on the iPad or iPhone for either the video or the audio tags  This is a restriction set in place by Apple to save the users bandwidth

User · Answer

Apple does not support the standard completely  but there is a workaround  Their justification is cellular network congestion  maybe because you ll land on pages that play random audio  This behavior doesn t change when a device goes on wifi  maybe for consistency  By the way  those pages are usually a bad idea anyway  You should not be trying to put a soundtrack on every web page  That s just wrong      html5 audio will play if it is started as the result of a user action  Loading a page does not count  So you need to restructure your web app to be an all-in-one-page app  Instead of a link that opens a page that plays audio  you need that link to play it on the current page  without a page change  This  user interaction  rule applies to the html5 methods you can call on an audio or video element  The calls return without any effect if they are fired automatically on page load  but they work when called from event handlers

User · Answer

If you create an Audio element using   var a   new Audio  my audio file wav      And add a suspend event listener via   a addEventListener  suspend   function     console log  suspended     false     And then load the file into mobile Safari  iPad or iPhone   you ll see the  suspended  get logged in the developer console  According to the HTML5 spec  this means   The user agent is intentionally not currently fetching media data  but does not have the entire media resource downloaded    Calling a subsequent a load    testing for the  canplay  event and then using a play   seems like a suitable method for auto triggering the sound

User · Answer

Apple annoyingly rejects many HTML5 web standards on their iOS devices  for a variety of business reasons  Ultimately  you can t pre-load or auto-play sound files before a touch event  it only plays one sound at a time  and it doesn t support Ogg Vorbis  However  I did find one nifty workaround to let you have a little more control over the audio    lt audio id  soundHandle  style  display none   gt  lt  audio gt    lt script type  text javascript  gt   var soundHandle   document getElementById  soundHandle       document  ready function         addEventListener  touchstart   function  e            soundHandle src    audio mp3           soundHandle loop   true          soundHandle play            soundHandle pause                  lt  script gt    Basically  you start playing the audio file on the very first touch event  then you pause it immediately  Now  you can use the soundHandle play   and soundHandle pause   commands throughout your Javascript and control the audio without touch events  If you can time it perfectly  just have the pause come in right after the sound is over  Then next time you play it again  it will loop back to the beginning  This won t resolve all the mess Apple has made here  but it s one solution

User · Answer

As of iOS 4 2 1  neither the fake click nor the  load   trick will work to autoplay audio on any iOS device   The only option I know of is to have the user actually perform a click action and begin playback in the click event handler without wrapping the  play   call in anything asynchronous  ajax  setTimeout  etc    Someone please tell me if I m mistaken   I had working loopholes for both iPad and iPhone before the most recent update  and all of them look like they ve been closed

User · Answer

I confirm that the audio isn t working as described  at least on iPad running 4 3 5   The specific issue is the audio won t load in an asynchronous method  ajax  timer event  etc  but it will play if it was preloaded  The problem is the load has to be on a user-triggered event  So if you can have a button for the user to initiate the playing you can do something like   function initSounds         window sounds   new Object        var sound   new Audio  assets sounds clap mp3        sound load        window sounds  clap mp3     sound      Then to play it  eg in an ajax request  you can do  function doSomething           post  testReply php  function data           window sounds  clap mp3   play                 Not the greatest solution  but it may help  especially knowing the culprit is the load function in a non-user-triggered event    Edit  I found Apple s explanation  and it affects iOS 4   http   developer apple com library safari  documentation AudioVideo Conceptual Using HTML5 Audio Video Device-SpecificConsiderations Device-SpecificConsiderations html

User · Answer

My solution is trigger from a real touch event in a prior menu  They don t force you to use a specific player interface of course  For my purposes  this works well  If you don t have an existing interface to use  afaik you re buggered  Maybe you could try tilt events or something

User · Answer

Works with jQuery  tested on Ipad v 5 1 1     video   get 0  play      You have to append remove the video element from the page

[iphone] Autoplay audio files on an iPad with HTML5

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