QDesign Corporation was a developer of digital audio compression technologies. The company's MP2 and MP3 technologies were used in professional audio and

broadcast automation Broadcast automation incorporates the use of broadcast programming technology to automate broadcasting operations. Used either at a broadcast network, radio station or a television station, it can run a facility in the absence of a human opera ...

systems as well as multimedia and video production systems. QDesign developed a music codec, originally known as LBpack. QDesign licensed the initial version of the codec and created the official audio compression in

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...

v3. The personal version comes with QuickTime Pro and allows encoding at bitrates up to 48 kbit/s. The professional version allows bitrates up to 128 kbit/s. Apple steered away from proprietary codecs in QuickTime like Sorenson Video and QDesign, and focused on standards like (

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related tec ...

). In recent years, usage of QDMC (= QDesign Music Codec) has generally given way to

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...

. The company also developed "QDX", a proprietary audio format targeted at providing the music industry with a solution to secure digital music distribution. The company was acquired in 2002 by DTS.

References

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External links

QDMC's site at QDesign
(backup at WayBack Machine). * QDesign encoders are available a
ReallyRareWares
Information technology companies of Canada