HTML5 audio streaming/download. How do I get the file to cache/download fully?

[Rohan Abraham]

HTML5 audio on Chrome caches differently compares to Firefox and Safari (Desktop/mobile)

An example can be seen here (try the audio player instead of video):

http://mediaelementjs.com/

On Chrome, the audio player downloads the audio only partially and does not go the whole distance.

Is there a way to get Chrome to download the whole audio file?

We need this because our app will require users to skip through to a different section which is not cached and causes higher wait times. It works well on Firefox/Safari/IE which downloads the whole file.

[Zlip792 .]

Working fine here with Chromium 35.0.1889.0 (256846) on Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit.

Chromium loads whole song.

[Si Robertson]

It's working fine for me as well, latest version of Chrome running on Windows 7 64-bit.

Chrome is doing things properly, it's sending byte-range headers to the server which in turn is only returning part of the file. That allows the music to be played quickly (the entire file doesn't have to download) and allows users to skip to any position within the music (at which point Chrome will request another small chunk of the file from the server).

I wouldn't recommend doing this, but if you need to force browsers to download the entire file, you need to prevent the server sending the HTTP Accept-Ranges header (or set the header value to none).