Stop audio buffering in the <audio> tag

html html5-audio audio-streaming buffering
Ruben picture Ruben · Nov 6, 2012 · Viewed 11.6k times · Source

I am currently working in using the HTML5 audio player to provide a audio stream (24/7 radio stream) via the (mobile) browser. Loading in the stream and playing it works fine.

The major problem is that the HTML5 <audio> tag will keep downloading (buffering) content even when its not active. This could be a major issue for mobile users since most of them pay for data use. So far I have not been able to find a decent solutions that works cross browser to prevent this.

I tried so far:

  1. Unload the source when pause is pressed. < This does not work cross browser
  2. Remove the audio player element and load a new one. This works but lets be honest, this is a very hacky way of performing an extremely simple task.

I was simply wondering if there is something I'm overlooking in this whole issue since I am convinced I'm not the only one with this issue.

Answer

Alistair Chisholm picture Alistair Chisholm · Apr 22, 2016

The <audio> element includes a preload attribute. This can be set to "none" or "metadata" which should prevent the audio preloading.

Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/audio

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