Audioactive High Quality Audio-on-Demand Streaming Forrest Stroud
While RealAudio has long held the pole position for high quality audio-on-demand streaming, Audioactive gives the current champ a run for its money. Audioactive uses MPEG audio encoding to compress sound bytes down to less than 10% of their original size while still retaining an extremely high level of quality.
Serving Audioactive Content
As with RealAudio, you can serve Audioactive content from your web site by purchasing an encoder and server. The Audioactive mp3 Producer is a set of audio tools that will allow you to encode streamed Audioactive content for any Web site. The encoder in mp3 Producer supports adjustable bit-rate capabilities, which allows sites to offer multiple audio sources at different bit-stream rates.
For example, a site could offer 28.8 Kbps users one type of audio stream, another type for ISDN users, and yet another for those who have higher 'net connections. The only downside is that while the cost of a RealAudio server ranges from $300 and up, the price of mp3 Producer and one of the Audioactive server options (necessary for serving streamed Audioactive content) is quite a bit higher at just under $10,000.
Limitations
The freeware Audioactive player also has a couple of negative aspects that keep it from being more competitive with players that use other streaming technologies (RealPlayer, NetShow, etc.) First, it lacks RealPlayer's web browser plug-in and inline web capabilities; Audioactive currently functions only as a web helper application. Second, Audioactive is an audio-only application, meaning that it lacks the video on-demand capabilities of clients like RealPlayer, NetShow, Streamworks, and VDOLive.
Finally, since the Audioactive specification is newer than some existing audio specs, you won't be able to find as many sample sound bytes for the player as you currently can for similar clients like RealPlayer. Still, when it comes to listening to a radio station on the Web or when you're just looking for great sound quality in real time, Audioactive definitely delivers.
