Three things I discovered (by trial-and-error) about the html <audio> tag.

[Audiophile]

1.    In a mobile or tablet PC, an <audio> tag will not be enabled until after a hyperlink has been employed.

So I used a silent "Welcome" screen inviting the user to "click" in order to proceed further.

 

2.    If  a background audio file is required to survive page transition, then a solution is to use the 
<frameset> tag.  I created two frames called "Left" and "Right".  "Left" width = 0% and "Right" 
width = 100%.  Hence "Left" cannot be displayed.
    
    The "Left" frame sources a page containing the <audio> tag, while the "Right" frame sources 
everything-else.

    NOTE:  The <frameset> tag was supported in HTML4 but allegedly not in HTML5.

 

3.    If it is required to stop an audio file playing (after it has started), this may be done by employing any 
hyperlink.  (I am not sure whether this applies to hyperlinks where the href attribute is an external 
URL, eg. a network).  But the condition is that the hyperlink must have the attribute target=_top.  
Such hyperlinks may reference a page containing an alternative <audio> tag and an alternative audio 
file which therefore will replace the one that was stopped.
 

[Audiophile]

When creating a Website it is obviously advantageous to debug it totally within the PC.  This avoids having to upload it to a host in order to debug it.

But when I right-click on "index.html" and select "Open with" and click on "Google Chrome", although the program runs there is no SOUND !  The Chrome html interpreter thus discriminates against against a PC-internal program versus an Internet-derived program.

I presume this is no bug but rather is the consequence of some obscure principle.

Also there seem to be some obscure differences between the treatment of <audio> tags between Chrome on Windows 7 versus Windows 10.  If your websites are old enough to have been created with Winsows 7, you might consider testing the SOUND using Chome on Windows 10.

 

 

[dsonesuk]

Depends if you are debugging it through a localhost server or the o/s file system.