Multimedia: High-end audio codec due from QDesign

MacWeek, March 16, 1998 by Joanna Pearlstein

A limited version of the company's QDesign Music Codec, QDMC SE, will be included free with Apple's QuickTime 3.0. Meanwhile, the $395 QDMC Pro will take aim at audio professionals who want "the highest possible quality at the lowest possible bit rate," according to Mandy Chan, QDesign vice president of marketing. The company said QDMC Pro will support 16-bit, 44.1-kHz audio over a 28.8-Kbps modem connection.

QDMC SE will handle preset bit and sample rates, while QDMC Pro will support any bit rate between 8 and 192 Kbits per second and any sample rate between 8 and 48 kHz. Encoding with the professional version will take substantially less time than with QDMC SE.

With QDMC Pro, Chan said, users will be able to access the codec within multimedia authoring tools such as Macromedia Director and Adobe Premiere. Users can take AIFF or .WAV files, save them as QuickTime movies and select QDMC Pro as the codec. QDesign said this technique can compress audio to less than 1 percent of its original file size.

In addition, QDMC Pro will encode files in real time, and it will allow users to vary input levels. It will offer support for batch encoding, clipping detection, high-quality sample rate conversion and psychoacoustic parameter adjustment, QDesign said. It will also let users customize default settings.

Both QDMC SE and Pro will provide single-channel stereo and real-time playback for decoding. Chan said the technology will be useful for streaming audio over the Internet. "With QuickTime [3.0] doing the streaming, you can do high-quality audio over the Net that surpasses what RealAudio has been able to do," she said.

QDMC Pro will be distributed by Terran Interactive Inc.

QDesign Corp. of Vancouver, British Columbia, is at (604) 688-1525; fax (604) 688-1524; http://www.qdesign.com.

Terran Interactive Inc. of Los Gatos, Calif., is at (408) 278-9065 or (800) 577-3443; fax (408) 278-9063; sales@terran-int.com; http://www.terran.com.