WAV and AIFF
Capability |
Rating |
---|---|
Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in |
Excellent. |
Interactive sound design capabilities |
Limited. Simply a file format for playback over PC (WAV) and Macintosh (AIFF). Button rollovers. |
Software cost for encoding and streaming |
Free. Can export WAV or AIFF files from any standard audio editing application including free Open Source audio editing applications. |
Level of documentation and support |
Limited/None. |
Audio encoding and content generation |
Easy. Easy to export AIFF or WAV files from any standard audio editing application. |
Audio authoring and delivery |
Easy. Easy to place WAV or AIFF files on a standard web server for downloading. |
Audio fidelity and compression |
Poor/None. Large WAV and AIFF sound files sound good when uncompressed. Neither offer elegant compression for high fidelity with small file sizes over limited bandwidths. |
Low-bandwidth performance |
Poor. WAV and AIFF work best as uncompressed 16-bit 44.1 kHz or 22.5 kHz sound files and are thus not suited for playback in low-bandwidth environments. |
Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming |
Poor/None. WAV and AIFF are merely audio file typesânot proprietary formats such as RealMedia that include server-side technologies. |
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