Although HTML5 brings many modern features to the web, its audio support leaves much to be desired. Google sought to improve the situation with its web audio API, but browser support remains spotty — while support for the audio tag by Apple’s iOS is poor — leaving developers left wondering what to do.
“We were presented with this very question while developing our new HTML5 game and set out to find a library that provided the functionality we needed, without all of the bloat, while still supporting the majority of browsers,” says developer James Simpson. “Unfortunately, we didn’t find anything that met our needs. So, we decided to create our own library and open source it.”
Enter the free Howler.js audio JavaScript library, which defaults to Web Audio API and falls back to HTML5 audio. The script supports multiple file formats to support all browsers and offers robust tools for working with audio sprites to bring better audio to your web pages.
