Macromedia's Shockwave Flash plug-in actually does much more than play streaming shockwave audio; it allows sophisticated animations and interactivity on the Web using "shocked" media created in either the Macromedia Flash or Director authoring systems. Both authoring systems allow for variable audio compression rates and corresponding sound quality.
Shockwave Flash
This streaming audio file was compressed from a 22kHz stereo 16-bit aif file (10MB) using Macromedia Flash. The resulting MP3 streaming Flash (.swf) file includes a 11KHz Mono 16 kbps MP3 audio (240kb). It is read by a Flash plug-in.

This button with event-based audio was also created using Macromedia Flash. It is about 13kb, including the soundfile. The audio file used for this "flashed" button was about 65kb.


Click on the "play" button of this Macromedia Director movie to hear a 30-second mono streaming shockwave audio example (184 kb) using the Shockwave Flash plug-in.