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

26
votes

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.

3
androidioshtmlaudio-recordingmicrophone
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. – Matt J.
@MattJ. You can look into the following html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/getusermedia/intro. This supports mobile browsers as well, just like you need. – Akshat Singhal
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 The article is outdated. – Matt J.
How about javascript? – Cilan
HTML5 capture API hasn't been implemented yet, so flash is the only option right now. – Cilan

3 Answers

36
votes

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

3
votes

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.

2
votes

getUserMedia() is now widely supported across mobile:

and desktop:

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

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

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:

Recorder.js demo running on iOS 11 Clicking Record prompts the user to allow microphone access