Designing Web Audio & CD-ROM

Director Shockwave

Capability	Rating
Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in	Fair.
Interactive sound design capabilities	Excellent. Technology is designed to compress multimedia files as well as create them with advanced Lingo scripting. Advanced button rollovers, transitions, sound effects, loops, audio synced to animation, scriptable fade-ins and fade-outs, and more.
Software cost for encoding and streaming	$900+. Must purchase Director to export Shockwave files. Format does not require dedicated server.
Level of documentation and support	Good.
Audio encoding and content generation	Easy.
Audio authoring and delivery	Hard. Director is a powerful multimedia authoring environment that takes time to master.
Audio fidelity and compression	Excellent. Shockwave audio files compressed with the MPEG codec in Director sound great.
Low-bandwidth performance	Poor. Shockwave files often drop out if a user’s bandwidth fluctuates. Shockwave and Flash audio streaming works best for users with 56 Kbps or DSL modem speeds.
Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming	Poor/Fair—HTTP Pseudo-Streaming. The Director Shockwave format does not support large-scale broadcasting.