Designing Web Audio & CD-ROM

QuickTime

Capability	Rating
Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in	Excellent.
Interactive sound design capabilities	Fair. Technology is a compression format and widely used playback standard, not a multimedia authoring environment.
Software cost for encoding and streaming	Free to $1,000+. Free to encode QuickTime and place downloadable files on web server. Large-scale managed streaming requires Mac OS X Server, which starts at over $1,000.
Level of documentation and support	Fair.
Audio encoding and content generation	Easy.
Audio authoring and delivery	Easy. No programming expertise is required to set up Mac OS X Server.
Audio fidelity and compression	Excellent. Q Design Music encoding technology.
Low-bandwidth performance	Excellent.
Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming	Good—Mac OS X Server. QuickTime support large-scale broadcasting. Number of streams depends on hardware configuration and bandwidth capacity.