Posted 18th November 2021
Autoplaying custom sounds on Windows is not natively possible in FileMaker. This does work in Mac with autoplay on a container field or in a webviewer. Since this depends on the Safari engine in MacOS this may not allow auto-play soon either. iOS has an AVPlayer function that allows for the playing of sound files from a container field, very easy!
This year (2021) saw Microsoft Edge putting certain rules on "autoplay" to prevent advertisements on web pages from automatically playing sounds. This prevents web-viewers and interactive containers from playing audio files, as they are reliant on the edge rendering engine in Windows. To get around this I have developed a FileMaker Plugin!
The plugin is simple, pass the file path to a .wav audio file and your file will play in the background without interruptine FileMaker, i.e. there is no pause while the audio file plays.
You can download this plugin for free from here: https://schwarzsoftware.com.au/CSoftwareFMPlugin.fmx64
You can download an example FileMaker File from here: https://schwarzsoftware.com.au/SoundExample.fmp12