Is there any possibility to control HTML5 audio volume on IOS?

Question

I use the html5 audio library Buzz to add sounds to a browser game. There is a toggle button to mute and unmute sound, which works good on desktop and Android devices. Unfortunately it seems like the audio tag is quite limited on IOS, so that I cannot mute audio in Mobile Safari (see https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AudioVideo/Conceptual/Using_HTML5_Audio_Video/Introduction/Introduction.html):

On iOS devices, the audio level is always under the user’s physical control. The volume property is not settable in JavaScript. Reading the volume property always returns 1.

Do you know any workaround to control volume of html5 audio tags in Mobile Safari?

Answer 1

I always thought dynamic volume control and certainly crossfading, as we all know, is impossible. Apple has dictated that it be so. Except.... apparently the folk at Kodo Games (specifically Nicola Hibbert?) have pulled it off and made the code available to anyone. I just checked it on iOS 8. Fading and crossfading seem to work!

Check it out (new site that works): Getting Started with Web Audio API

Answer 2

To add volume change support to iOS and not rewrite your entire app from html5 audio to web audio for that, you can combine these audio solutions via createMediaElementSource.

Please see more details at Mozilla website https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AudioContext/createMediaElementSource

Answer 3

I worked around this by simply stopping all sounds and setting a variable isMuted to true or false, so I can check this everywhere a sound is played:

// set the variable
var isMuted = false;

// toggle audio
function toggleMute() {

    var toggleAudioBtn = $(".toggleAudio");

        if (isMuted == false) {
            sounds.stop();
            isMuted = true;
            toggleAudioBtn.css("background-image", "url('images/ui/btn_audio_mute.png')");
        } else {
            isMuted = false;
            toggleAudioBtn.css("background-image", "url('images/ui/btn_audio.png')");
        }

};

// for every sound check if sound is muted
if(isMuted == false) {
    sound.play();
}