Question

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here because I can not figure out how to render the html 5 audio tag with custom controls.

I have this html so far, and it works no problem:

<audio controls preload='none'><source src='the url to the audio' type='audio/wav' /></audio>

How do I get it to display ONLY the play button, and perhaps when playing, show the pause button in it’s place.

From what I read,

By default, the element will not expose any sort of player controls.
You can create your own controls with plain old HTML, CSS, and
JavaScript. The element has methods like play() and pause() and a
read/write property called currentTime. There are also read/write
volume and muted properties. So you really have everything you need to
build your own interface.

If you don’t want to build your own interface, you can tell the
browser to display a built-in set of controls. To do this, just
include the controls attribute in your tag.

But I can not find any examples of using custom controls. How do you get just the play button?

Answer 1

You create your elements like so…

<audio id="yourAudio" preload='none'>
    <source src='the url to the audio' type='audio/wav' />
</audio>
<a href="#" id="audioControl">play!</a>

And add some functionality:

var yourAudio = document.getElementById('yourAudio'),
    ctrl = document.getElementById('audioControl');

ctrl.onclick = function () {

    // Update the Button
    var pause = ctrl.innerHTML === 'pause!';
    ctrl.innerHTML = pause ? 'play!' : 'pause!';

    // Update the Audio
    var method = pause ? 'pause' : 'play';
    yourAudio[method]();

    // Prevent Default Action
    return false;
};

Right now, the button is just simple text (“play!” or “pause!”), but you could do just about anything you wanted with CSS. Instead of setting the innerHTML, set the className and you’re good to go!