playing a WAV file on iOS Safari

Question

I'm struggling to get a WAV file to play on a HTML page as either an HTML5 audio tag or via a regular downloadable link in mobile Safari (iPad/iPhone):

<audio controls src="audio-pcm_s16le-8k.wav"/></audio>
<a href="audio-pcm_s16le-8k.wav">audio</a>

The HTML5 audio object just shows Cannot play audio file in it, and when I click to download the anchor referenced one I get a black page with a "can't play this circle" in the middle. I've tried various frequencies (8000, 11025, 16000, 32000, 44100), various encodings (mu-law, Linear Signed 16-bit LE and BE), various containers (.wav, .caf, .aiff), and various audio conversion programs (Audacity, ffmpeg, and Apple's own afconvert)... I can't get audio to play (unless I make it MP3 -- and no, I can't just use MP3 or AAC, I need a "raw" format for reasons too long to get in to here).

I looked at the supported formats for iOS and it appears to support WAV... anyone got any experience with this issue? I'm on latest iOS 6.0.1

EDIT: The selected answerer got me to the issue, but the reason is in the comments of the answer. Bottom line is it requires HTML range headers for playing the files.

Answer 1

Well, you've certainly gotten me on the right track at least... it's apparently not the file at all... it's the web server. Same exact content from stockley works, but on my web server it doesn't. I'll have to look over the HTTP response in detail I suppose. My web server is returning Content-Type: audio/x-wav so it's not that...

Checking the headers for the test site I set up, you want to be returning Content-Type: text/html for the page containing the HTML data you need:

And Content-Type: audio/x-wav for the actual audio file (http://www.test.com/file.wav)

Answer 2

Through a run of trial and error I found that you need a content-range header for it to work. Here's an example of my headers that allows a wav file to play in Safari for iOS:

Content-Range: bytes XX-XX/XX
Content-Type: audio/wav 
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="whatever.WAV" 
Content-Length: XX    

Hope this helps!