Audio Recorder Polyfill

MediaRecorder polyfill to record audio in Edge and Safari. Try it in online demo and see API.

• Spec compatible. In the future when all browsers will support MediaRecorder, you will remove polyfill.
• Small. 1.11 KB (minified and gzipped). No dependencies. It uses Size Limit to control size.
• One file. In contrast to other recorders, this polyfill uses “inline worker” and don’t need a separated file for Web Worker.
• MP3 and WAV encoder support.

navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({ audio: true }).then(stream => {
  recorder = new MediaRecorder(stream)
  recorder.addEventListener('dataavailable', e => {
    audio.src = URL.createObjectURL(e.data)
  })
  recorder.start()
})

Install

Install package:

npm install --save audio-recorder-polyfill

We recommend creating separated webpack/Parcel bundle with polyfill. In this case, polyfill will be downloaded only by Edge and Safari. Good browsers will download less.

Files recorded without the polyfill will not be playable on Safari, it is highly recommended to convert it to MP3 on the back-end of your application. If that’s not an option you can use the polyfill in all browsers to force the audio to be converted to the right format with the price of client’s performance.

  entry: {
    app: './src/app.js',
+   polyfill: './src/polyfill.js'
  }

Install polyfill as MediaRecorder in this new bundle src/polyfill.js:

import AudioRecorder from 'audio-recorder-polyfill'
window.MediaRecorder = AudioRecorder

Add this code to your HTML to load this new bundle only for browsers without MediaRecorder support:

+   <script>
+     if (!window.MediaRecorder) {
+       document.write(
+         decodeURI('%3Cscript defer src="/polyfill.js">%3C/script>')
+       )
+     }
+   </script>
    <script src="/app.js" defer></script>

ES Modules

Polyfill supports ES modules. You do not need to do anything for bundlers.

For quick hacks you can load polyfill from CDN. Do not use it in production because of low performance.

import AudioRecorder from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/audio-recorder-polyfill/index.js'
window.MediaRecorder = AudioRecorder

Usage

In the beginning, we need to show a warning in browsers without Web Audio API:

if (MediaRecorder.notSupported) {
  noSupport.style.display = 'block'
  dictaphone.style.display = 'none'
}

Then you can use standard MediaRecorder API:

let recorder

recordButton.addEventListener('click', () => {
  // Request permissions to record audio
  navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({ audio: true }).then(stream => {
    recorder = new MediaRecorder(stream)

    // Set record to <audio> when recording will be finished
    recorder.addEventListener('dataavailable', e => {
      audio.src = URL.createObjectURL(e.data)
    })

    // Start recording
    recorder.start()
  })
})

stopButton.addEventListener('click', () => {
  // Stop recording
  recorder.stop()
  // Remove “recording” icon from browser tab
  recorder.stream.getTracks().forEach(i => i.stop())
})

If you need to upload record to the server, we recommend using timeslice. MediaRecorder will send recorded data every specified millisecond. So you will start uploading before recording would finish.

// Will be executed every second with next part of audio file
recorder.addEventListener('dataavailable', e => {
  sendNextPiece(e.data)
})
// Dump audio data every second
recorder.start(1000)

Audio Formats

Chrome records natively only to .webm files. Firefox to .ogg.

You can get used file format in e.data.type:

recorder.addEventListener('dataavailable', e => {
  e.data.type //=> 'audio/wav' with polyfill
              //   'audio/webm' in Chrome
              //   'audio/ogg' in Firefox
})

WAV

As default, this polyfill saves records to .wav files. Compression is not very good, but encoding is fast and simple.

MP3

For better compression you may use the MP3 encoder.

import AudioRecorder from 'audio-recorder-polyfill'
import mpegEncoder from 'audio-recorder-polyfill/mpeg-encoder'

AudioRecorder.encoder = mpegEncoder
AudioRecorder.prototype.mimeType = 'audio/mpeg'
window.MediaRecorder = AudioRecorder

Limitations

This polyfill tries to be MediaRecorder API compatible. But it still has small differences.

• WAV format contains duration in the file header. As result, with timeslice or requestData() call, dataavailable will receive a separated file with header on every call. In contrast, MediaRecorder sends header only to first dataavailable. Other events receive addition bytes to the same file.
• Constructor options are not supported.
• BlobEvent.timecode is not supported.

Custom Encoder

If you need audio format with better compression, you can change polyfill’s encoder:

  import AudioRecorder from 'audio-recorder-polyfill'
+ import customEncoder from './ogg-opus-encoder'
+
+ AudioRecorder.encoder = customEncoder
+ AudioRecorder.prototype.mimeType = 'audio/ogg'
  window.MediaRecorder = AudioRecorder

The encoder should be a function with Web Worker in the body. Polyfill converts function to the string to make Web Worker.

module.exports = () => {
  function init (sampleRate) {
    …
  }

  function encode (input) {
    …
  }

  function dump (sampleRate) {
    …
    postMessage(output)
  }

  onmessage = e => {
    if (e.data[0] === 'init') {
      init(e.data[1])
    } else if (e.data[0] === 'encode') {
      encode(e.data[1])
    } else if (e.data[0] === 'dump') {
      dump(e.data[1])
    }
  }
}