The Audioactive brand was created by audio hardware manufacturer Telos to market their products dealing with MP3 technology.

All products are based on encoders and decoders developed by Fraunhofer, so you know quality is going to be good. The encoder is based on FhG MP3enc.

The problem with Audioactive Production Studio is that quality comes at a price. A very hefty price. You see, it was offered in two versions: Lite, which allowed encoding at bitrates up to 56kbps and then, sitting alone in the mid-high bitrates, 128kbps. Also it did not allow the user to select the high quality encoding mode - only fast mode is available. It cost US$34,95 plus shipping, which was a pretty big deal, specially way back in the late nineties.

And then there was the pro version, wich allowed bitrates all the way up to 256kbps (but not 320 and 224, for some reason) and the high quality encoding mode (which is very slow), but it cost a whopping 149,95 dollars plus shipping!

Telos stopped marketing their Audioactive products, but you can still peek at a mirror of the original web site at the Internet Archive, here.


Date: 2000-05-30
Version: 2.04
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: aaps204.zip - 2.822kB

Date: 1998-06-13
Version: 1.05e
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: aaps105e.exe - 1.865kB

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Audioactive also created a freeware MP3 player. It has a playlist editor, a tag editor and not much more than that - not even an equalizer - but decoding quality is very good since it uses the FhG decoder.

The Mac player is just a clone of the FhG MacPlay3 down to the same preferences screen. But it refused to play every single MP3 file I threw at it claiming they were "copyright protected". MacPlay3 played them without issues, so I suggest you use that player instead.

Date: 2000-07-07
Version: 2.06c
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: aaplay206c.exe - 1.485kB

Date: 1997-02-24
Version: 1.2d1
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Mac OS Classic (PPC)
Download: AudioActive1.2a.sit - 642kB