With origins tracing back to 1995, QDesign is a provider of advanced audio compression technologies. Currently, QDesign offers three main products. These are QDX, the QDesign Music Codec and the QDesign MPEG ACM. QDX is designed for consumers who demand seamless access to music over a wide variety of devices, including portable players, digital assistants and cell phones. With QDX, all music is automatically encoded at CD quality.

With the Professional Edition of the QDesign Music Codec, users can compress audio files at levels up to 128 KBits. This technology is ideal for the Internet, where the user can deliver high quality audio, while still complying with bandwidth restrictions.

The MPEG ACM product utilizes MPEG-2 stereo compression technology and allows the user to encode broadcast quality sound without the need for compression hardware. A few features of this application are: the ability to store audio at less than 20% of the original file size, Macintosh and Windows cross platform capability, sending CD quality audio over the Internet and streaming audio broadcasts over the Internet.

Note: For users of the MVP product, QDesign will continue to support users of that product, but bug fixes and feature enhancements are no longer available.

To learn more about QDesign, I spoke with Alex McFarlane at their office in Vancouver. He said: “QDesign started making MPEG-2 codecs, mostly geared towards the broadcast sector. We had our own applications and we licensed our MPEG-2 technology to a lot of the broadcast automation system vendors, etc. We became world renowned for having the best implementation of MPEG-2 audio in the world. From there, we developed a proprietary codec called the QDesign Music Codec, which is inherent in QuickTime.”