Shockwave Audio is a technology that makes sounds smaller and plays them faster from disk or over the Internet.

Shockwave Audio can compress the size of sounds by a ratio of up to 176:1 and is streamable, which means Director doesn’t have to load the entire sound into RAM before it begins playing. Director starts to play the beginning of the sound while the rest of the sound is still streaming from its source (from a disk or over the Internet). When used properly, the Shockwave Audio compression and streaming features provide fast playback of high-quality audio, even for users with relatively slow modem connections to the Internet.