| 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. |