The Astrid/Quartex AAC codec was one of the biggest lies that ever happened to the audio coding community (only maybe surpassed by Mafuka, which was more of a prank).

The readme claims Astrid is an AAC encoder based on MPEG-4 sources released by NTT (Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, the developers of VQF). It is limited to CD audio (44.1kHz, stereo, 16bit) and only supports 64, 96 and 128kbps bitrates.

The reality is that Astrid AAC is far from being ISO AAC compliant. Actually, it is far from being AAC! The encoding routines are based on libraries stolen from Celestialtech's AudioLib (that was based on Elemedia's PAC encoder). Not surprisingly the original binaries were encrypted.

The binaries available here have been decrypted by me, if only because they can now be better compressed with Zip. They were encrypted with PELOCKnt, and I used peunlock to reverse the process.


Date: 1998-10-11
Version: 0.2 (decoder 0.1)
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: astrid.zip - 571kB