HTML5 Local Storage of audio element source - is it possible?

I've been trying to do this myself, on the iOS (for iPhone / iPad) but it refuses to cache audio files in offline, even if in Cache Manifest.

It does not error, but instead simply pretends to have played the audio element if invoked via JavaScript without a control. If it's embedded with a control, it displays an alternate control that says "Cannot play audio file.". It works fine if the application is able to go online.

It seems not to cache the audio, playing another sound resource seems to cause it to clear the previous resource from memory - this is pretty worthless functionality even when online.

I have experimented with base64 encoding the audio as data URI's. This works in Safari on the desktop (at least for fairly short samples of around 20-30k that I've been using) but seems not to be supported at all on iOS - it silently does nothing, which is highly annoying.

I don't know about other vendors - Google Chrome used to not support data URI's for audio but perhaps they fixed it... - it seems like it's not possible for now though.

Update: Minor discrepancy with iPhone OS 3.x (tested with 3.1.2): If an audio element is specified in an offline web app but it doesn't have a control, it displays a non-interactive control with a non-animated spinner on it (which it definitely shouldn't do). I assume this is fixed in iOS 4.x (which should be out next week).

So it's been a while since I asked this question and I thought i'd give some info about how we solved it. Basically we encoded the data into PNG's using a similar technique to this:

http://audioscene.org/scene-files/yury/pngencoding/sample.html

Then cached the image on the mobile device using html5 local storage and accessed it as needed. The PNG's were pretty big but this worked for us.

I spent a while trying to do this for a game I'm making, and since as far as I could tell browsers (Firefox and Chrome) still don't support caching of audio elements I thought I'd post the solution I found.

There is a workaround described here: http://dougx.net/plunder/index.php#code

I can confirm it works pretty well, but is probably better suited to smaller files. As he describes here (http://dougx.net/plunder/GameSounds.txt), you encode the audio as base64 strings, and give them a data:audio/ogg;base64 (or any compatible audio format) header, which HTML5 audio can then read in. Because this is just a string, the browser will cache it.

I guess it would be preferable to get the manifest approach working, since this feels like the most relevant mechanism for locally caching the file.

What happens if you alter the audio file's HTTP headers, e.g. Content-Type and Expires? Does the browser do something different if the file extension is changed?

I see you've had no luck so far.

You might want to take a look at JAI (JavaScript Audio Interface) ("the world's first javascript interface for web <audio>"). Or get in touch with Alastair MacDonald, who wrote it.

Failing that, the HTML5 Doctor may be able to assist.