Building an online media platform is a daunting task, particularly when you’re striving to release a consistently appealing, high-quality product. Audience satisfaction — and return visits — rely heavily on an enjoyable, accessible user experience (UX). When it comes to integrating media files into your online presence, top-notch performance is paramount.

Anyone who has ever spent hours of post-production time trying to smooth out the rough edges on a media file knows what a time-consuming task that can be. Perhaps the worst part is the we-should-be-done-by-now feeling it evokes and the desire to move on to the next project.

Instead of personally polishing your media files, services such as Dolby.io’s Interactivity and Media Processing APIs can take care of the tedious work for you. With long days of programming ahead, you can look to save time by using only a few lines of code to offer your listeners studio-quality processing. All you need is to be familiar with Dolby.io’s application programming interface (API) offerings and what they have to offer your online platform.

Interactivity and Personalization

Dolby.io’s Interactivity API package is designed to offer its users a convenient framework for building live media applications using proprietary code. Technicians will be interested to know that the Dolby.io package includes powerful and customizable client software development kits (SDKs), REST APIs that facilitate user authentication, and Voxeet’s UXKit for interface design.

The Dolby.io API package was designed primarily to produce interactive experiences, but the use of these components offers myriad benefits to other media experiences as well.

Take a video-based marketing website, for example. In most scenarios, it would be next to impossible for a small team of technicians to host video streams that maintain consistent quality across a wide variety of connection speeds.

That level of impossibility gets multiplied when it comes to presenting media files recorded via various online communication platforms. We’ve all experienced video conferences where one or more attendees have a terrible connection. The quality of recorded conferences tends to rely solely on the quality of each participant’s connection. With some support from industry technology, the level of annoyance can be mitigated but not entirely eliminated.

Enter the Dolby.io Interactivity APIs, which adds a Selective Forwarding Unit formulated to display streams with a video goal of 1280×720 pixels (HDTV) and 30 frames per second (fps). For audio, the package also provides Dolby Voice–powered processing for realistic real-time and non-real-time speech quality in professional settings.

This enhancement includes dynamic voice volume, spatial audio, noise reduction, and network resilience to maintain quality with bad connections. Dolby.io also offers the capability of designing a mixer layout for manual post-stream processing of recordings.

Audio Enhancement

The Dolby.io Media Processing APIs take these polishing effects to the next level. In contrast to the primary use case of the Interactivity APIs, the Media Processing APIs are designed to enhance on demand audio files of all kinds.

The first, Media Enhance, improves audio similarly, but its focus on pre-recorded audio enables techs to make improvements that contribute to sound being expertly mixed. Processing effects include noise reduction, dynamic equalization, and tone shaping with a higher level of precision — perfect for professional media platforms.

Two additional Media Processing APIs are Media Diagnose and Media Analyze. The former measures for overall quality and looks for specific issues that might be leaving your audio at a disadvantage. Media Diagnose then outputs that information for you to refer to when finalizing. Media Analyze assesses your sound file and gives you an idea of its quality by measuring multiple aspects. It also analyzes whether that file will be accepted by certain platforms and scans for less problematic but fixable issues.

The final Media Processing API is Media Speech Analytics. This API specializes in speech-centered audio. It combines the Media Diagnose and Media Analyze processes to output speech-oriented analytics. It can, for example, identify the number of speakers, analyze individual recording issues, and exhibit useful statistics about speaker activity.

Dolby’s Knowledge Base

Despite the many other API offerings for audio enhancement available, Dolby.io’s offerings stand out. One reason is their extensive device database.

The Dolby.io Interactivity APIs boast wide device compatibility, as its database can identify and control most connected devices. The Media Processing APIs also integrate Dolby’s audio processing algorithms. These provide quality only found in a professional mixing studio but designed for anyone who can interact via API.

The Time-Saving Advantages of Dolby.io APIs

The importance of providing quality audio tends to get overlooked in favor of the visual aspects of a media product. Televisions, for example, are advertised using eye-popping visuals. Much of the time, sound is a relative afterthought.

However, high-quality sound makes all the difference — it creates an atmosphere. If you close your eyes while listening to a video, you ought to be transported to another place. Sound evokes an emotional response that ties you to the moment. What was once a ho-hum website video becomes more of an immersive experience — all due to a few extra lines of code.

Nothing cuts down on the stress of media product development quite like a streamlined software pipeline. Integrating top-quality media files with your online brand presence — in any form — becomes a quick and simple task.

Using the Dolby.io APIs, the audio and video stream process is virtually monitored, and the review process becomes far more efficient. Access to an API brings this all to fruition much quicker since Dolby.io’s engineering expertise becomes part of your toolkit. Your media benefits from that know-how, and your audience benefits from an experience more unified in style and caliber.