QDesign became a famous player in the audio encoding scene when they launched the QDesign music codec, as the advanced audio encoding option in QuickTime, in early 1998. But by then they had already built some fame for themselves as purveyors of quality MPEG audio encoders since 1996.

So here we have two codecs from QDesign, both provided by the great Radium guys. i-Media is a graphical encoder and decoder for MP1 and MP2 files, and one of its major features is encoding directly from line-in - a feature sought-after by broadcasters (which are the target audience, and that explains the steep license price: 495 dollars).

The encoder is also optimized to be fast, both in the high quality mode and even faster in the fast mode. The idea is to enable MP2 encoding in real time from line-in on mid-1990s computers.

Then, we have an ACM codec for the Windows Audio Compression Manager. It encodes only to MP2, but has the advantage of working with all programs that can use ACM. Also, it comes with an interesting little app (that gets installed to the system tray) which allows users to change the playback speed of streams using the respective decoder. And it was much cheaper than i-Media: "only" 79 dollars.

A third alternative for people wanting to enjoy the QDesign MP2 encoder - a free one! - is using the Iomega RecordIt app. Sadly, it will not work with WAV files, but can rip from CDs without trouble.

QDesign de-emphasized their MPEG audio products in the early 2000s, focusing instead on QDMC and their music library manager MVP. Then it got bought by DTS in 2004. You can see a mirror of their i-Media page, as well as one of their ACM codec page, hosted at the Internet Archive.


Date: 1997-06-11
Version: 2.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: imda200.zip - 1289kB

Date: 1998-07-07
Version: 1.01
Interface: Graphical (ACM codec)
Platform: Win32
Download: qdmp2acm.zip - 1588kB