How can I play u-law encoded wav file in Chrome?

4
votes

My company has an IVR system that records all messages in µ-law format. This is hardware enforced and cannot be changed. The files play automatically in IE and Firefox using WMP or QuickTime, but over the last year, Chrome has begun enforcing use of its internal player for WAV files rather than allowing WMP or QT to play them. Google's position (seen here: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=217772) appears to be that µ-law and a-law encoding is old, is not supported, and will not be supported going forward.

My options appear to be, to either a) tell my customers not to use Chrome, b) convert our millions of recordings to another format and/or write a program to convert on the fly, or c) find a player I can embed on our website (flash or java or something) that will play the µ-law encoded files in Chrome.

I would like to do option C but haven't been able to find anything that works.

Sample audio file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/51656694/sample.wav

1
google-chromeaudiowav
Having the same problem with cnrtl.fr/morphologie/fran%C3%A7ais. Any luck finding solution? – Ivan Balashov
In my case, Google solved it by decided to support the formats in their internal player. – jason

1 Answers

3
votes

I don't want to delete the question, but the answer turned out to be convincing Google to change their mind. With release 33 of Chrome, as long as you have disabled any extensions/media players, like Apple Quicktime, the internal player in Chrome will play µ-law and a-law encoded files. Details of the fix can be found at the link provided in the question.