Why certain .wav files cannot be decoded in Firefox

Question

I have a web page which decodes wave files for certain reasons. Chrome and Safari seem to work fine. Firefox occasionally is unable to decode the file and gives the error:

Answer 1

I've recently had this problem with Firefox not reading wav files using the browser's audio api and found out that the problem was the bit depth of the audio file which should not exceed 16bits in order to be recognized by Firefox. I've also found out that this is a 8 years old Firefox "bug" which is quite surprising (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524109)

My soultion was to downgrade any wav files with 32 bit depth to 16bit via sox commandline like this: sox input.wav -b 16 output.wav. You could obviously use ffmpeg or any other application which can do that under Linux. Hope that helps.