Wavekit compared to other audio hosting services

If you're looking for an audio hosting service, Wavekit might be just the thing for you. Let's check out how it compares to the popular alternatives in the market today.

In this article:

• Services overview
• General features
• Audio player features
• Streaming quality
• Audio encoding
• Page size impact
• Player load speed
• Player privacy features
• Wrapping up

Services overview

These are the audio hosting services I will be comparing:

Wavekit

This is us. We're an audio hosting service focused on helping audio pros sell their products and services online. We're not a social network and we're not in the business of tracking people or selling data to advertisers.

Soundcloud

Soundcloud is mainly a social network built around music. It also offers additional services for artists such as distribution to streaming platforms and cloud-based audio mastering. Soundcloud is great fit for artists looking to grow a community.

Mixcloud

Mixcloud is a streaming platform with monetization options and automatic distribution of revenue to copyright owners. Mixcloud is a great platform to host DJ mixes, podcasts, and radio shows.

Audius

Audius is a free social media and audio streaming platform that offers monetization through their own crypto currency. Audius is a good fit for artists that want to share their music and monetize it.

Audio

Audio is a free audio hosting service connected to the free Audacity audio editor by MuseCorp. Audio was designed to be able to easily share any type of audio content online for free.

Clyp

Clyp started as a free audio hosting service and switched to a paid service in 2020. It's focused on sharing audio online with others and includes some social features.

General features

Even though there are overlapping features, every service solves a different problem. We're focused on helping you add audio to your website as easily as possible. We don't offer any social media or monetization features.

Audio player features

All audio hosting services offer media players that can be embedded in a website but these vary wildly in features and their purpose.

We designed our player exclusively to help you add audio to your website. It's customizable, unbranded, doesn't have links to our website to distract your visitors, and doesn't use cookies that could track your vistors.

Check out some demos of our player.

Audio streaming quality

Good audio quality is critical to ensure the best audio experience. Especially if your main audience are professional users that will evaluate your content critically (ie: when buying a product of yours).

It should be noted that SoundCloud offers high quality streaming but it's only available to paid subscribers when using the SoundCloud app (not the embedded player).

Lossless streaming

Clyp offers lossless streaming in the WAV PCM format. It's a raw audio format which consumes a lot of bandwidth and might be inadequate for longer audio files and/or mobile devices.

Starting in 2024, Wavekit will offer FLAC streaming. It's an encoded lossless audio format with ample support in browsers which consumes a fraction of WAV while retaining the exact same audio quality.

Audio encoding

Not all MP3s are created equally. The quality of the encoding is as important as the streaming quality.

At Wavekit we're very transparent in how we process your audio (pun intended). For MP3 encoding we use the LAME encoder. For FLAC we use FFmpeg's native encoder. Both are battle tested encoders and considered to be some of the best in the industry.

Unfortunately, other audio hosting services do not offer information on how they process audio so we cannot compare.

Page size impact

Every time a visitor comes to your website they'll need to download the audio player, even if they never click the play button. Embedding a lightweight player is essential to provide a good user experience.

These are the bytes downloaded by the embedded players before your visitor clicks on the play button:

The numbers are displaying all transferred bytes including images and other data and were measured at the date of publishing this article.

URLs we used for measuring: Wavekit, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Audius, Audio, Clyp.

Player load speed

There are many factors that determine how fast an embedded player loads. We've put a lot of effort into optimizing our infrastructure so that your content is available as fast as possible to your visitors.

These results represent worst case scenarios with slow networks and low powered devices as measured by WebPageTest.

WebPageTest results: Wavekit, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Audius, Audio, Clyp.

Player privacy features

It's important to consider the privacy features of embedded media players. Visitors of your website could be subjected to third party tracking cookies and their behavior could be shared with advertisers.

Furthermore, with the GDPR laws, the data controller (the website embedding the player) is obligated to disclose third party cookies and any data sharing.

Our player doesn't use cookies or any tracking technologies. It also doesn't make requests to advertisements companies that could expose the personal data of your users. Our optional metrics are anonymous. See our documentation for more information on the data collected by our player.

Privacy policies: Wavekit, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Audius, Audio.

Wrapping up

If you think Wavekit might be a good fit for your use case give us a try! You can test Wavekit for free during 30 days with no credit card.