TooVox plug-in

ToolVox Plug-in for Netscape 2.0 -- ToolVox delivers high-quality audio on the web with better than 53:1 compression rates, thanks largely in part to Voxware's Metavoice technology. Speech is delivered quickly and reliably, even playing while other images and aspects of the document are loading. Perhaps the most surprising part is that audio quality is not sacrificed even at such high compression rates, which has the advantageous result of fluid speech from even the most congested of web sites. The ToolVox control panel allows users to operate a slidebar that slows down or speeds up the audio feed, depending on the user's preferences. ToolVox only plays (not creates) audio feeds; however, Voxware has also released an encoder client that will record ToolVox clips for playing on the web. In contrast to competitors like RealAudio, buffering and playback of ToolVox files are controlled by the player; as a result, any standard HTML server can act as a streaming media server. This feature alone is bound to please webmasters and audiophiles webwide as the cost (upwards of $10,000) and time of installing a special server are eliminated. ToolVox also gives webmasters the option of streaming long speech files (inline presentations) or downloading short files from within the web site. ToolVox has entered a highly competitive field with the likes of RealAudio, TrueSpeech, and VDOLive, and even at this early stage it holds it own. With such an impressive initial release, one can only guess at how successful ToolVox will be as it continues to develop. Pros: High-quality audio on the web, excellent compression rates, no server needed for playing files Cons: Limited to audio feeds (unlike VDOLive), audio quality could still be better New: No obvious New features in 1.1 Beta 4 Version Reviewed: 1.1 Beta 4 Date of Review: 5/14/96 Reviewer: Forrest Stroud apps conference Main Menu