PsyTEL Research was a company in Yugoslavia working on an optimized implementation of the MPEG2/4 AAC standard. It was founded around 1998 by Ivan Dimkovic, the lead programmer.

While the first release (the MPEG-4 Studio) was little more than a compile of the ISO reference sources, quality started progressing quickly and, for some time, it was the only really optimized ISO AAC encoder publicly available (versions from FhG and Dolby were only available to developers interested in implementing their technology). Liquifier was also available, but streams created by it were encrypted.

Two versions are available here, AACenc - slow and high quality, and Fastenc - fast and lower quality. At the bottom you will find PsyTEL MPEG-4 studio, an ISO reference sources compile with a buggy frontend (said frontend is a shameless rip off from FhG MP3 Producer by the way).

Around mid-2002 PsyTEL Research and all its assets were bought by Ahead Software AG, makers of Nero Burning ROM, and AACenc became Nero AAC Encoder. You can still visit a mirror of the web site at the Internet Archive.

Obs: AACenc and Fastenc require the Intel ia32math.dll library. Download it here - 126kB.


Date: 2002-03-02
Version: 2.15
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: aacenc215.zip - 141kB

Date: 2002-02-10
Version: 2.12
Download: aacenc212.zip - 141kB

Date: 2002-01-31
Version: 2.11
Download: aacenc211.zip - 141kB

Date: 2002-01-17
Version: 2.1
Download: aacenc21.zip - 141kB

Date: 2002-01-11
Version: 2.02
Download: aacenc202.zip - 139kB

Date: 2002-01-04
Version: 2.01
Download: aacenc201.zip - 144kB

Date: 2002-01-01
Version: 2.0 (Complete release package)
Download: aacenc20.zip - 528kB

Date: 2001-12-26
Version: 1.61b
Download: aacenc161.zip - 143kB

Date: 2001-12-22
Version: 1.6
Download: aacenc16.zip - 138kB

Date: 2001-12-14
Version: 1.5
Download: aacenc15.zip - 137kB

Date: 2001-12-06
Version: 1.3
Download: aacenc13.zip - 137kB

Date: 2001-09-06
Version: 1.2
Download: aacenc12.zip - 137kB

Date: 2001-04-20
Version: 1.0 (Complete release package)
Download: aacenc10c.zip - 263kB

Date: 2001-01-18
Version: 1.0b
Download: aacenc10b.zip - 110kB

Date: 2000-10-11
Version: 1.0a
Download: aacenc10a.zip - 101kB

---

From 2001-02-09 to 2001-04-17, leading up to the release of AACenc version 1.0, Ivan released every few days "Public Evaluation Versions" that let enthusiasts check development progress and provide feedback about output quality and bugs. They have been collected in the file below, kindly provided by Martin Wagner, who also provided the changelog documenting the fast pace of development.

Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: PsytelEval.7z - 226kB

---

Date: 2002-03-04
Version: 2.0
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: fastenc.zip - 95kB

---

Date: 1999-03-19
Version: experimental 1.0alpha2
Interface: Command line + frontend
Platform: Win32
Download: studio1.0a2.zip - 262kB

---

In late 2001, a little before their assets were bought by Ahead, Psytel started working on an MPEG4 audio + video solution that is available for download here. Some caveats:

• It is a beta release, so it expires 30 days after first use
• Audio compression is limited to 1 minute, if you encode a longer video, everything after the 1 minute mark will be silent
• It does not work on AVI files. It requires a raw YUV file + an uncompressed WAV file, both will be encoded and later merged
• While the audio encoder is pretty good, being based on Psytel AACenc, the video encoder is quite terrible

Date: 2001-11-21
Version: Developer beta 1
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: mp4devbeta1_setup.exe - 669kB