Capability
|
Rating
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Browser compatibility and percent of
browsers with Plug-in
|
Fair.
|
Interactive sound design capabilities
|
Outstanding. Format is built for sound designers.
Advanced button rollovers, transitions, sound effects, and loops.
|
Software cost for encoding and streaming
|
$10 to $100.
Inexpensive to purchase Beatnik software package. More expensive if
you want direct consulting and support from Beatnik engineers.
|
Level of documentation and support
|
Good.
|
Audio encoding and content generation
|
Difficult.
Must have familiarity with composing MIDI scores and editing digital
audio samples.
|
Audio authoring and delivery
|
Difficult.
Beatnik requires a fairly complex setup and testing process to encode
hybrid MIDI audio files into the Beatnik format and to develop the
Java-Scripts necessary for synchronized playback.
|
Audio fidelity and compression
|
Outstanding/Good.
Supports MP3 compression. Overall playback sound quality is
phenomenal relative to file size. Note, Beatnik is not a format for
encoding streaming audio files.
|
Low-bandwidth performance
|
Outstanding
|
Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale
streaming
|
Poor/Fair -- HTTP Pseudo-Streaming.
However, Beatnik files are generally very small so they download
quickly making true streaming not as necessary as with other more
bandwidth intensive formats.
|