Designing Web Audio & CD-ROM

Beatnik

Capability	Rating
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.