Play an audio file using jQuery when a button is clicked

Which approach?

You can play audio with <audio> tag or <object> or <embed>. Lazy loading(load when you need it) the sound is the best approach if its size is small. You can create the audio element dynamically, when its loaded you can start it with .play() and pause it with .pause().

Things we used

We will use canplay event to detect our file is ready to be played.

There is no .stop() function for audio elements. We can only pause them. And when we want to start from the beginning of the audio file we change its .currentTime. We will use this line in our example audioElement.currentTime = 0;. To achieve .stop() function we first pause the file then reset its time.

We may want to know the length of the audio file and the current playing time. We already learnt .currentTimeabove, to learn its length we use .duration.

Example Guide

When document is ready we created an audio element dynamically
We set its source with the audio we want to play.
We used 'ended' event to start file again.

When the currentTime is equal to its duration audio file will stop playing. Whenever you use play(), it will start from the beginning.

We used timeupdate event to update current time whenever audio .currentTime changes.
We used canplay event to update information when file is ready to be played.
We created buttons to play, pause, restart.

$(document).ready(function() {
    var audioElement = document.createElement('audio');
    audioElement.setAttribute('src', 'http://www.soundjay.com/misc/sounds/bell-ringing-01.mp3');
    
    audioElement.addEventListener('ended', function() {
        this.play();
    }, false);
    
    audioElement.addEventListener("canplay",function(){
        $("#length").text("Duration:" + audioElement.duration + " seconds");
        $("#source").text("Source:" + audioElement.src);
        $("#status").text("Status: Ready to play").css("color","green");
    });
    
    audioElement.addEventListener("timeupdate",function(){
        $("#currentTime").text("Current second:" + audioElement.currentTime);
    });
    
    $('#play').click(function() {
        audioElement.play();
        $("#status").text("Status: Playing");
    });
    
    $('#pause').click(function() {
        audioElement.pause();
        $("#status").text("Status: Paused");
    });
    
    $('#restart').click(function() {
        audioElement.currentTime = 0;
    });
});

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<body>
    <h2>Sound Information</h2>
    <div id="length">Duration:</div>
    <div id="source">Source:</div>
    <div id="status" style="color:red;">Status: Loading</div>
    <hr>
    <h2>Control Buttons</h2>
    <button id="play">Play</button>
    <button id="pause">Pause</button>
    <button id="restart">Restart</button>
    <hr>
    <h2>Playing Information</h2>
    <div id="currentTime">0</div>
</body>

$("#myAudioElement")[0].play();

It doesn't work with $("#myAudioElement").play() like you would expect. The official reason is that incorporating it into jQuery would add a play() method to every single element, which would cause unnecessary overhead. So instead you have to refer to it by its position in the array of DOM elements that you're retrieving with $("#myAudioElement"), aka 0.

This quote is from a bug that was submitted about it, which was closed as "feature/wontfix":

To do that we'd need to add a jQuery method name for each DOM element method name. And of course that method would do nothing for non-media elements so it doesn't seem like it would be worth the extra bytes it would take.

For anyone else following along, I've simply taken Ahmet's answer and updated the original asker's jsfiddle here, substituting:

audio.mp3

for

http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/Track%2093.mp3

linking in a freely available mp3 off the web. Thank you for sharing the easy solution!

I here have a nice and versatile solution with a fallback:

<script type="text/javascript">
    var audiotypes={
        "mp3": "audio/mpeg",
        "mp4": "audio/mp4",
        "ogg": "audio/ogg",
        "wav": "audio/wav"
    }

    function ss_soundbits(sound){
        var audio_element = document.createElement('audio')
        if (audio_element.canPlayType){
            for (var i=0; i<arguments.length; i++){
                var source_element = document.createElement('source')
                source_element.setAttribute('src', arguments[i])
                if (arguments[i].match(/\.(\w+)$/i))
                    source_element.setAttribute('type', audiotypes[RegExp.$1])
                audio_element.appendChild(source_element)
            }
            audio_element.load()
            audio_element.playclip=function(){
                audio_element.pause()
                audio_element.currentTime=0
                audio_element.play()
            }
            return audio_element
        }
    }
</script>

After that you can initialize as many audio as you like:

<script type="text/javascript" >
    var clicksound  = ss_soundbits('your/path/to/click.ogg', "your/path/to/click.mp3");
    var plopsound  = ss_soundbits('your/path/to/plopp.ogg', "your/path/to/plopp.mp3");
</script>

Now you can reach the initialized audio element whereever you like with simple event calls like

onclick="clicksound.playclip()"

onmouseover="plopsound.playclip()"

What about:

$('#play').click(function() {
  const audio = new Audio("https://freesound.org/data/previews/501/501690_1661766-lq.mp3");
  audio.play();
});

Play an audio file using jQuery when a button is clicked

Which approach?

Things we used

Example Guide

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