Get audio duration on Chrome for Android

Question

I'm getting the audio/video duration of a file without appending it to the screen. "Using the same code", when I try to get the video duration on both sides it works as expected. But when using audio files it says that the duration is 0 on Android, but it works on a desktop computer.

// Only working on Desktop
var audio = new Audio(url);

// Hide audio player
// player.appendChild(audio);

audio.addEventListener('loadedmetadata', function() {
  alert(audio.duration);
});

And the below code is working:

// Working on Desktop and Android
var video = document.createElement('video');
video.src = url;

// Hide video
// player.appendChild(video);

video.addEventListener('loadedmetadata', function() {
  alert(video.duration);
});

Answer 1

EDIT: Using the durationchange event is much easier. First the 0 is being output, but as soon as the file is loaded (that's where loadedmetadata fails I guess) the updated and real duration will be output.

audio.addEventListener('durationchange', function(e) {
    console.log(e.target.duration); //FIRST 0, THEN REAL DURATION
});

OLD WAY (ABOVE IS MUCH FASTER)

Looks like this "bug" (if this is actually a real bug) is still around. Chrome (40) for Android still outputs 0 as the audio files duration. Researching the web didn't get me a solution but I found out the bug also occurs on iOS. I figured I should post my fix here for you guys.

While audio.duration outputs 0, logging audio outputs the object and you can see that the duration is displayed just right there. All this is happening in the loadedmetadata event.

audio.addEventListener('loadedmetadata', function(e) {
    console.log(e.target.duration); //0
});

If you log audio.duration in the timeupdate event though, the real duration is being output. To only output it once you could do something like:

var fix = true;
audio.addEventListener('timeupdate', function(e) {
    if(fix === true) {
        console.log(e.target.duration); //REAL DURATION
        fix = false;
    }
    console.log(e.target.currentTime); //UPDATED TIME POSITION
});

I'm not sure why all this is happening. But let's be happy it's nothing serious.

Answer 2

There is a different approach you can try but, if duration doesn't work with your device (which IMO is a bug) then it's likely this doesn't either; worth a shot though:

audio.seekable.end(audio.seekable.length-1);

or even

audio.buffered.end(audio.buffered.length-1);

though the latter is dependent on content being loaded which in this case probably then won't help.