HTMLAudioElement

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The HTMLAudioElement interface provides access to the properties of <audio> elements, as well as methods to manipulate them.

This element is based on, and inherits properties and methods from, the HTMLMediaElement interface.

Constructor

Audio(): Creates and returns a new HTMLAudioElement object, optionally starting the process of loading an audio file into it if the file URL is given.

Instance properties

No specific properties; inherits properties from its parent, HTMLMediaElement, and from HTMLElement.

Instance methods

Inherits methods from its parent, HTMLMediaElement, and from HTMLElement. It offers no methods of its own.

Examples

Basic usage

You can create a HTMLAudioElement entirely with JavaScript using the Audio() constructor:

const audioElement = new Audio("car_horn.wav");

then you can invoke the play() method on the element

audioElement.play();

Note: A common gotcha is trying to play an audio element immediately on page load. Modern browser's default autoplay policy will block that from happening. Refer to Firefox and chrome for best practices and work arounds.

Some of the more commonly used properties of the audio element include src, currentTime, duration, paused, muted, and volume. This snippet copies the audio file's duration to a variable:

const audioElement = new Audio("car_horn.wav");
audioElement.addEventListener("loadeddata", () => {
  let duration = audioElement.duration;
  // The duration variable now holds the duration (in seconds) of the audio clip
});

Events

Inherits methods from its parent, HTMLMediaElement, and from its ancestor HTMLElement. Listen to events using addEventListener() or by assigning an event listener to the oneventname property of this interface.

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard # htmlaudioelement

Browser compatibility

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