This is a native audio playback within html5 which is not consistent in every browser. Not all browsers have OGG or MP3 support.
Audio Tag DocumentationThis audio tag allows for simple music playback with basic controls.
With this configuration, the audio controls are hidden and the audio is preloaded when the page loads.
Soundmanager 2 is a wrapper and extension of HTML5 audio and Flash audio APIs combining them into a single javascript API. This API does not work on local machine, it will not initiate Flash and terminate. Parameters for playback can be defined at playback or when the API initializes.
Soundmanager 2 DocumentationThis API contains a library of buit-in functions for audio playback. For example, to mute a sound file you only have to call soundmanager.toggleMute('audio-id') instead of making a button that calls a javascript function to switch from mute and unmute. There are also built-in events, which allows for different variations in playback.
This API also contains buit-in functions that allow for greater control of the audio playback. You can set volume similar to the Audio Tag, but you can also set the Pan and Position of sound file.
Using this API, you can extract the metadata from the sound files and create visualizations.
360-player canvas visualizations
drum machine
christmas lights
paint brush
This API is a high level javscript API for processing and synthesizing audio within HTML5. It is not a stable API at this time as it is still in development. This API is developed by w3c, and there is similar but lower level API called Audio Data API is being developed by mozilla.
Web Audio API documentation
Unlike working with audio elements, you can't simply set the source and have it load. Most often, you will load the audio file with an XMLHttpRequest and an asynchronous callback. Depending the web audio elements are linked together defines the output. The most basic connection is source and the destination, and you can add gain, filters, convolver, and panner to modify the source before sending the source to the destination.
Play
Stop
Adding effects using filters to the audio.
3D sound capabilities based on the OpenAL library. There is an audioListener and audioSource with audioPannerNode.
Interfaceing Javascript with Processing.js