The QDesign Music Codec was originally LBpack, by Dmitry Shmunk. QDesign corporation bought the codec and hired the developer to create what would become the official audio compression in Apple's QuickTime v3.

The codec's official name is "RaveSound", according to this press release, but is commonly called QDesign Codec. It is one of the most agressive encoders known - meaning it compresses quite well at very low bitrates, but its intense processing of the audio signal introduces too many artifacts even at higher bitrates.

The personal version comes with QuickTime Pro and allows encoding at bitrates up to 48kbps. The professional version allows bitrates up to 128kbps and fine-tuning some encoding parameters.

Hosted here are professional plugins for QuickTime Pro and MVP - QDesign's attempt to enter the audio library manager market - that has unlimited encoding of QDMC up to 128kbps. It can also encode MP3 (but the encoder quality is terrible) and MP2 (a quite decent encoder). All of these are available for both Windows and Mac OS Classic.

I am also hosting here an analysis document created by Benjamin Larsson, describing the first steps in reverse engineering the codec. An open source decoder is now available in the FFMPEG project.

In the early 2000s Apple steered away from proprietary codecs like Sorenson Video and QDesign and started focusing on standards (MPEG4). The QDesign codec lost relevance and the company was bought by DTS in 2004. The codec became the basis of DTS LBR (also known as DTS Express).

A mirror of the QDesign website can still be visited at archive.org. I also saved locally a mirror of the QDesign Music Codec Professional Edition product page.


Date: 2000-07-28
Version: 1.2.51
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: mvppc12.exe - 2.083kB

Date: 1999-22-10
Version: 1.2.32
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Mac OS Classic (PPC)
Download: QDesignMVP1.2.32.sit.bin - 1.985kB

Date: 1999-05-13
Version: 2.0
Interface: Graphical (QuickTime component)
Platform: Win32
Download: QDesign_2_Pro.zip - 707kB

Date: 2000-04-06
Version: 2.1
Interface: Graphical (QuickTime component)
Platform: Mac OS Classic (PPC)
Download: QDesign_Music_2.1.sit - 698kB

Date: 1999-07-15
Version: 2.0.1
Interface: Graphical (QuickTime component)
Platform: Mac OS Classic (PPC)
Download: QDesign_Music_2.0.1.sit - 708kB

Date: 2004-01-14
Version: 1.2
Interface: PDF document
Platform: -
Download: qdmc2.pdf - 309kB