| Capability
| Rating
|
| Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in
| Excellent.
|
| Interactive sound design capabilities
| Excellent. Format is both a popular playback standard and a multimedia authoring environment.
Button rollovers, transitions, sound effects, loops, and audio synced to animation.
|
| Software cost for encoding and streaming
| $200+.
Must purchase Flash application to export Flash files. Format does not require dedicated server.
|
| Level of documentation and support
| Excellent.
|
| Audio encoding and content generation
| Easy.
|
| Audio authoring and delivery
| Medium to Easy.
Easy to encode Flash audio and place on standard web server for HTTP delivery. Medium difficulty to author Flash content.
|
| Audio fidelity and compression
| Outstanding/Poor.
Embedded sound effects and loops compressed with the MP3 compression technology sound great. Longer-playing streaming files tend to drop out.
|
| Low-bandwidth performance
| Poor.
Flash is not designed as a streaming playback medium. Flash streaming audio does not perform well in low-bandwidth environments. In contrast, Flash sound effects and loops work great with Flash's compact vector animation.
|
| Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming
| Poor/Fair.
The Flash format does not support large-scale broadcasting. RealFlash does support large-scale broadcasting when used with Real Networks RealServer. |