Before there was video, there was audio. It started with MIDI files that would happily play when you loaded a website (often accompanied by a dancing-baby.gif), moved to .wav files that you could play in the browser, and has since moved on to mp3s and other compressed audio formats.

Until recently, playing audio required a plugin of some sort. But thanks to the evil geniuses who put together the HTML5 spec we now have a fully fledged Audio element and JavaScript API to play with. With great power comes great responsibility. Apparently. And so before we go on and take a look at how to [...]