How to record audio on webpage (iOS, Android, PC/Mac) - no flash

Question

I have a requirement to allow a user to record an audio file using their microphone, but it has to work without flash as it needs to work on iOS (mobile safari), Android browser or Chrome, and a modern browser on a PC/Mac.

Is there a clean, simple HTML5 method for recording audio and posting to a server? I haven't been able to find anything.

Ree

I was just going to ask this today. I've looked around a lot and I'm pretty sure the answer is NO. It's workable with Chrome and Firefox, but IE and Safari are no dice. Would love to hear some recent thoughts on the matter though. – Attitude

@MattJ. You can look into the following html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/getusermedia/intro. This supports mobile browsers as well, just like you need. – Gyrocompass

Akshat, sorry, but I already looked at that. Only supports Chrome and Firefox. The articles says that iOS 6+ is supposed to support it, but that ended up being dropped. The article is outdated. – Attitude

How about javascript? – Abbess

HTML5 capture API hasn't been implemented yet, so flash is the only option right now. – Abbess

@Jim Jones Facing the same issue. Found any solution? – Matrix

Answer 1

You can use the HTML5 WebAudio API.

An introduction to audio and video capturing Capture audio & video in HTML5

A good library to record audio with samples Recorder.js

A complete and working sample using Recorder.js How to record audio in Chrome with native HTML5 APIs

Other WebAudio API demos HTML5 Web Audio API Demos and Libraries

Supported browsers Can I use Web Audio API?

Regarding to send the data to other server, using Recorder.js you can get the audio buffer, then you could use XMLHttpRequest to POST the arraybuffer or blob to the destination server directly or encoded as base64.

MDN: Sending and Receiving Binary Data

Html5Rocks: New trick ins XMLHttpRequest2, sending data

Margetts

No good. The question specifically asks about iOS. Web API recording is a no-go under Safari and Recorder.js will only yield an error message saying the API is not supported. – Attitude

I did not test Web Audio Api on Safari (iOS) but apparently the api is supported from 6.0-6.1 or later, what version are you using? – Margetts

@Margetts The web audio api is supported by Safari, but accessing the mic/input is not. I have just tested this in Safari 8 (8.0.8) on OS X 10.10.5. (I have not tested in iOS but have read elsewhere that the restriction is the same as desktop Safari) – Dday

Any update on this for mid 2016? Can I use Windows Phone, Android? Is there a solution for Nokia phones? – Ley

This does not work on the iPhone. Just checked it on iOS 10.2. Up-to-date info here: mobilehtml5.org. – Lancelancelet

iOS 11 (to be released fall 2017) is supposed to implement the Web Audio APIs in Safari and WebViews. – Aboveboard

Answer 2

Professionally speaking I would say no, there are audio APIs for HTML5 but their implementation varies across browsers at the moment. If you're doing this for a tech demo of sorts then that might suffice but otherwise you might need to fall back to other technologies like flash and/or native apps for more reliable results.

Byrle

Answer 3

getUserMedia() is now widely supported across mobile:

• Safari on iOS 11 (except UIWebView)
• Chrome on Android

and desktop:

• Safari 11
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Edge 12
• Opera

Once webcam/mic permission is given and the mic data kicks in you can:

• encode the sound using JS libraries like Recorder.js (wav), WebAudioRecorder.js (wav,mp3,Vorbis) or vmsg (mp3).
• or use the (native) Media Recorder API to capture Opus audio in .ogg (Firefox) and .webm (Chrome) files together with this neat polyfill for Safari 11 and Edge that produces .wav files.

Here's a demo I made (live demo, source on GitHub) that uses Matt Diamond's Recorder.js to record audio (pcm in .wav files) running in Safari on iOS 11. Clicking Record prompts the user to allow microphone access:

Microvolt