What is audio content?

In StreamShark, audio content refers to an input file that contains an audio stream. StreamShark encodes, replicates, and streams your audio content, removing the complexity of delivering high-quality audio on the web. It achieves this by seamlessly encoding your audio into widely supported formats.

This document outlines the available audio encoding and delivery options, helping you understand when each format or presentation mode is most appropriate.

What audio encoding are available?

StreamShark can transcode your audio content into a variety of formats (containers and codecs) at different quality levels. This ensures your content reaches the widest possible audience while delivering excellent playback quality across devices, platforms, and connection speeds.

The table below lists all available output formats and quality levels.

• MP3 is a popular, lossy audio format that significantly reduces file sizes. It is a universal standard for storing and streaming audio on almost all devices, including phones and computers.
• Ogg is an open-source, free multimedia container format, designed for efficient streaming and high-quality digital audio. It offers superior sound quality compared to MP3 at similar file sizes.
• FLAC is an open-source, patent-free format that reduces digital audio file sizes by 50–70% without losing any quality. Unlike lossy formats like MP3 and Ogg, FLAC decompresses to an identical, bit-for-bit copy of the original audio, making it the preferred choice for audiophiles, archiving, and high-resolution music.

What are my delivery options?

You can deploy audio content through Streaming Events and Video on Demand (VOD). Let's take a look at each one in detail.

Streaming Events

Audio Only is also supported for Streaming Events. Depending on your usage plan, you may see "Audio Only" options available in the Transcode Template dropdown.

When you select one of these options for an event, the same headphone icon will appear on the control bar, allowing you to switch between audio and video modes just as you can with VOD. The "Audio Only" option at the end of the list is equivalent to the True Audio Only profile for VOD, meaning the stream contains no video at all.

If you are unsure, a safe choice is to keep the default MP3 and OGG output options. This provides broad compatibility, supporting modern and older browsers as well as mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Android phones and tablets.

If you want further advice on formats, please reach out to StreamShark support by filing a ticket or emailing support.

Video on Demand

For information on how to use VOD, please refer to this article. This guide focuses specifically on audio content.

When adding a video, you can choose from two predefined profiles — Audio Only and True Audio Only — in addition to manually customising the encoding options.

The key difference is that with Audio Only, the final output remains a standard video stream, but viewers can switch to audio-only mode during playback. This is particularly useful for mobile users who want to listen with their screens locked or only glance at the screen occasionally. Most mobile operating systems restrict video playback in the background when the screen is off. This limitation cannot be bypassed, except when the content is delivered in audio-only mode.

The user can switch to audio-only mode by clicking the headphone icon on the control bar, and vice versa.

True Audio Only, on the other hand, encodes the content exclusively in audio formats. This allows you to select different audio quality levels to suit your needs, and the player will operate in audio-only mode by default.