LBPack (Low Bitrate Packer and Player) was created in the mid-nineties by Dmitry Shmunk, an engineer working at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Russia. He later went on to work at QDesign in Canada, and LBpack became the QDesign Music Codec.

It is optimized for extremely low bitrates (the default for 44kHz stereo is 36kbps!), and indeed it delivers quite acceptable quality at this compression level. But the codec is so aggressive that even at higher rates it can not achieve transparency.

It suffers from many of the problems QDesign suffers: distortions when encoding voice, annoying artifacts, metallic sound, etc. Also, just like QDesign, it is super slow to encode, CBR and stereo-only.

And what is that trippy screenshot towards the bottom right of the page, I hear you ask? Well, that is the LBPack player for DOS! It features a fancy 9-band equalizer and spectrum analyzer visualizations, but no information about the song being played. Also, it expects to output to a SB16-compatible card - hence, I ran it emulated in a DOSbox. Still, looks pretty good for a DOS player!

Besides the DOS player it also ships with a Win32 player (LBWin) shown in the top screenshot. It features the same 9-band equalizer and a playlist manager.

Versions 1.53 and 1.57 below are demonstrations, they do not encode stereo files and are limited to encoding a fixed number of samples. Version 1.60 is registered and has no such limitations.

The official page was taken offline after the codec was bought by QDesign and I couldn't find a mirror anywhere, so nowadays the only information about this codec is available in the readme and FAQ inside the download package.

Lots of thanks to Geert from Belgium for submitting this encoder and enlightening me on its history and its relation to QDesign.


Date: 1997
Version: 1.60
Interface: Command line + graphical player
Platform: DOS/Win32
Download: lb.zip - 154kB

Date: 1997-05-19
Version: 1.57
Interface: Command line + graphical player
Platform: DOS/Win32
Download: lbit157.zip - 215kB

Date: 1996-12-20
Version: 1.53
Interface: Command line + graphical player
Platform: DOS/Win32
Download: lbit153.zip - 129kB