The solution is to use the “embed” tag.

Just use the tag.

This will use the QuickTime plugin.

I really fail to see the difference between these 2 solutions with regard to licensing, do you?

Fact is, folks, mp3 IS supported by Firefox, just in the old HTML tags. Strange but true. Unfortunately, Mobile Safari doesn’t support those tags, so I gotta use the HTML5 tags that do for it to work there, even though regular desktop SAFARI works fine with the old embed tags, and in fact renders the page totally different from mobile Safari, so APPLE is plenty to blame in the middle of this, and let’s not forget that Apple owns mp3 on the mac now. They bought out all the other encoders for Mac so they could dominate the iTunes monster. High time for antitrust in my opinion.

I’m a mac guy, but I really feel like giving them a royal middle finger of late. The flash debacle is beyond description. People who do multimedia aren’t interested in supporting all these stupid variations. They want to make the content interesting. Detect for mobile safari and leave it at that.

I havent looked into the javascript options, but it seems like browser/device detection is the only way around this one.

MP3 : audio :: HTML : markup

It’s even in our language, maybe not german :) But I imagine, you don’t say “Did you download the new Radiohead ogg?” No. And you never will.

If FireFox wants to take a hard stance on NOT supporting MP3 in their AUDIO tag, then they should not render their Audio player if they don’t support that source… then the web could progress, and their player would just gracefully degrade like IE.

The purpose of the Mozilla Foundation (briefly explained)

The Mozilla Foundation is and will always be a non-profit organization. All their products -including firefox- are licensed by the terms of the Mozilla Public License, therefore they are open-source and free software. Implementing support for a non-open format like MP3 would violate that spirit. Also, who would have to pay for the licensing of the LAME-Codec? Firefox is getting millions of contributions from the community, yet MPEG-LA would sue the Mozilla Foundation.
You could say, the MF has got enough money for licencing the codec, but (at least to me) it seems the licensing claims of MPEG-LA are rather arbitrary. It’s a risk for the MF which is neither calculable nor acceptable.

Also, Ogg Vorbis is superior to MP3/LAME. Why is that?
Let’s elaborate:

1) It’s an open and well-documented format.
Any browser manufacturer can easily implement support for Ogg Vorbis into their software. Plus, there aren’t any licensing issues as with MP3. It’s royalty-free and (hopefully) will stay that way, as the MPEG-LA has failed to bring it down with patent violation claims.

2) When of the same quality as an MP3, the ogg file is smaller in file size.
It’s not that important with today’s low GB prices even for webspace, but nice to know nonetheless.

I’m not saying, Ogg Vorbis is the best audio codec of all times. It’s a little more of a challenge for the CPU to decode, which is why on mobile devices it drains the battery a little faster than playing mp3s, but on desktop machines as well as on modern (note|net)books, you really don’t have to take that into account.
I myself simply find, that Vorbis is worth using, a while ago, I encoded my entire music library (~120GiB) to Ogg Vorbis and never looked back.

Call me a FOSS-nazi, but if any audio codec should be the standard for html5 and the _open_ web, it’s vorbis.

PS: If you spot any grammatical errors in this text you can either keep them or forgive me because I’m German *g*

<audio controls autobuffer>
<source src=”firefox does not support html5 mp3.ogg” />
<source src=”elvis.mp3″ />
<!– now include flash fall back –>
</audio>

If the host system does not have resources to convert to ogg, then firefox is asking everybody who uploads any sounds to be converted – I don’t see it happening.

<audio controls autobuffer>
<source src=”elvis.mp3″ />
<!– media not supported fallback –>
</audio>

would be better.

In the case with Austin Town Hall i’d have to re-encode thousands of MP3s, upload them by hand to properly associate them to one of the 6000+ posts, teach our editors how to do that in the future, and then implement a system of custom fields to support both types of audio files.

When this falls on Occam’s Razor, we see that the simplest solution, the best solution, is for FF to just support MP3 so we can all move on.

<audio controls autobuffer>
  <source src="elvis.ogg" />
  <source src="elvis.mp3" />
  <!-- now include flash fall back -->
</audio>

Source: HTML5 Doctor

Again, I agree, its alot more work for the developer, but if you provide the right formats, it should improve the user’s experience.

According to that article, Firefox does have the unfortunate problem of not actually falling back to another format, but if you put .ogg before .mp3, everyone should play nice.

This is all totally theoretical (for me), as I have yet to try out </audio> and </video>. But as much as I’ve read, the solution seems solid.

The problem with degradation in this circumstance is Firefox’s fall back for audio+mp3 is the black X. Which is maybe more simply my point. You have get into feature detection (with modernizr or what have you) to determine if MP3 is supported by the browser and then implement a fall back.

The IE6-8 fallback is to ignore the audio tag and just output what’s in between. That would be the preferred fallback if the browser doesn’t support that type of audio. Ironically, IE beats Firefox in this.

But even more importantly, there is really no excuse for not supporting MP3 on the world wide web.

I look forward to the day I never have to download a plugin again.