Designing Web Audio & CD-ROM

MIDI

Capability	Rating
Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in	Excellent.
Interactive sound design capabilities	Limited. Format is designed for song compression and to allow electronic devices to communicate, not as a multimedia authoring environment. Button rollovers.
Software cost for encoding and streaming	Free to $100+. If you already have MIDI files, you can post them to a web server for free. To create your own MIDI, files you will need to purchase a MIDI editor such as Vision or Cubase.
Level of documentation and support	Limited/None.
Audio encoding and content generation	Difficult. Must have familiarity with MIDI authoring environments such as Vision, Cubase, Performer, etc.
Audio authoring and delivery	Easy. Easy to place MIDI files on a standard web server for playback.
Audio fidelity and compression	Fair. Note, since MIDI is not a digital audio format but a form of music notation, audio fidelity is dependent on the user’s sound card and sound engine.
Low-bandwidth performance	Outstanding
Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming	Poor/Fair—HTTP pseudo-streaming from a standard web server.