| 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. |