Designing Web Audio & CD-ROM

Liquid Audio

Capability	Rating
Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in	Poor.
Interactive sound design capabilities	Limited/None. Format is designed solely for music distribution. Audio synced to video or text for music video simulation.
Software cost for encoding and streaming	$1,000+. Basic starting level software package costs about $1,000.
Level of documentation and support	Good.
Audio encoding and content generation	Medium.
Audio authoring and delivery	Medium. As a format designed for specific professional applications, Liquid Audio provides detailed support and automated setup functions.
Audio fidelity and compression	Excellent. Supports MP3 compression.
Low-bandwidth performance	Fair. Although Liquid Audio is designed for previewing audio files in low-bandwidth environments, downloading large Liquid Audio files is best suited for high-bandwidth connections.
Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming	Good—Liquid Server. Note that Liquid Server is primarily designed for secure music sales and distribution.