Liquid Audio was, for a while, the only way you could come in contact with that hot new audio encoding technology from the same creators of the hugely popular MP3, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG): Advanced Audio Coding (AAC).

See, the sudden and huge popularity of the MP3 format created a big scare among recording studios and executives, and they were quick to place part of the blame on MPEG in general and Fraunhofer in particular for coming up with a technology that (in their misguided little minds) served for little more than assisting pirates distributing their precious IP.

Wanting to avoid a public relations headache, not to mention the threat of court battles, FhG vowed that AAC files would never exist in the wild as pure unprotected songs. They would only license their technology to developers interested in building systems around it providing strong DRM protections.

Fortunately years later they reversed that decision, probably realizing they were losing a lot of money with that idiotic restriction (after all, mandatory DRM equals low popularity) only to abide to the tantrums of an industry living on borrowed time.

But in the few years that this policy stood, it was indeed very difficult for users to get access to unprotected AAC. They needed to be contented with slow and buggy encoders based on reference sources or know the right people (like me) that could fix them with a copy of the latest version of a quite better encoder, but nothing amazing (compared to what we were promised when AAC was launched).

So, in all this context we saw the launch of Liquid Audio. It was meant to be a huge, complete platform for (legal! protected!) digital music sales and distribution. Despite initially being based on the Dolby AC3 format, it only started catching people's attention after it added AAC support.

The main tool enabling this platform was Liquifier, a very featureful program meant to strip audio tracks of that pesky freedom to be shared and played whenever and wherever. It had many features: line-in recorder, CD ripper, basic audio editor. You could add lots of information about each track: title, artist, composer, lyrics, notes, album art, etc, etc. And in the end, you could create the Liquid Master file, a single file containing all the information and several different versions of the track (encoded at diferent bitrates and/or different encoders, each version with customizable rights: burn to CD, export to device, export to MP3, expiry date... Also, the free versions can be created as only short clips, not the entire track).

The encoders available in version 5.0 were AAC (FhG), MP3 (FhG), and AC3 (Dolby); with bitrates as low as 8kbps for modem streaming and as high as 256kbps for "CD Quality". The player version 5.1 for Mac hints at the addition of Sony Atrac3 as a choice of encoder.

Below you have the Liquifier 5.0 installer for Win32 and the cracked executable zipped together with a cracking instructions file. It is worth mentioning that the installer refuses to run on Windows XP, I suspect it is locked to only run on Windows 9x and Me (but I did not try it on Windows NT 4 or 2000). Also, you can have a pre-cracked ZIP package that you can extract and run on whichever Windows version - even Windows 10, if you provide the required DLL - and it will just work.

The player was pretty but not very featureful. It seems more interested in finding a way to display all the countless metadata that can come with the track than providing actually useful features such as equalizer and a playlist manager.

Finally, as I mentioned before Liquifier creates LQM - Liquid Master - files. And the players only play LQT - Liquid Track - files. The idea is that recording studios would use Liquifier to generate masters according to their specifications and the necessary information, and then submit these masters to the Liquid Servers. These were in charge of processing payments from customers and providing them LQTs derived from masters. Of course these servers have gone offline decades ago, so if you want to try Liquid Audio for yourself you will need the little lqm2lqt tool that does exactly that - converts LQM to LQT tracks so they can be played on Liquid Player.

Liquid Audio enjoyed some success for a few years but could not compete with better established competitors in the music distribution arena such as Real Networks with Real Audio and Microsoft with WMA. It disappeared in the early 2000s, and you can still see a mirror of the site at the Internet Archive.

Big thanks to Max Telkov for reminding me of Liquid Audio and submitting most of the downloads below.


Date: 1999-12-23
Version: 5.0 beta 2
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Installer: LiquifierPro5.0-b24.exe - 10.413kB
Crack: liquifier50_cracked.zip - 1.859kB
ZIP package: liq50b24.zip - 2.054kB

Date: 1999-02-24
Version: 4.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: liquifier4.zip - 1.587kB

Date: 1999-08-07
Version: 5.0 b23
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: lmp50026b.exe - 1.783kB

Date: 2001-04-12
Version: 5.1.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Mac OS Classic (PPC)
Download: LiquidPlayer5.1Installer.sit - 4.674kB

Date: 2000-08-10
Version: 2.0
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: lqm2lqt.zip - 18kB