QDX aims to be digital audio standard
by Dennis Sellers, dsellers@maccentral.com
November 15, 2000, 7:00 am ET
Despite many trials, investments, announcements, and strategic alliances a new standard for digital audio has yet to emerge -- QDesign Corp. plans on changing that with QDX.
"The game is far from over," Ken Ashdown, QDesign's vice president of marketing, told MacCentral. "The ultimate winner will be the format to offer a truly seamless music experience. To earn consumer confidence, technology must provide 'anywhere, anytime' quality and ease-of-use across the widest array of hardware and software platforms."
QDesign is promoting QDX, which they describe as the "first truly scalable, secure digital music platform," at this week's Webnoize 2000, an annual summit meeting for music industry reps and technology people.
"The topic that consistently makes the rounds at such meetings is that the public has spoken, and there is a future for digital music," Ashdown said. "The question is how can we make it easier for consumers so that they enjoy the experience. We don't need a complex or painful way to get digital music. But there are more and more hardware devices, more and more modes (both wired and wireless) -- and storage media proliferates. But consumers need to be able to get music in a seamless and easy-to-use way. We think QDX is the answer."
QDX is a dynamically scalable digital music platform solution that offers exclusive user-friendly features and enables new products, services, revenue streams, and business models, said Ashdown. Unlike other formats, a single QDX source (master) file can be streamed or downloaded at any equal or lower data rate without transcoding, while maintaining exceptional quality and resulting in significant asset management savings."
QDX means you're no longer limited to music-only downloads, subscription or ad-based streaming models, according to QDesign. They say that its enhanced security protects your copyrights; that it guarantees optimal quality over any network, any bandwidth, and any modem speed; and that QDX offers genuine dynamic "on-the-fly" scalability.
QDX also sports Fit-to-Media and Fit-to-Stream features, which are designed to dynamically and automatically scale music files to the smallest increments. Fit-To-Media can purportedly store up to five times more music on a portable device (2.5 hours per 32 MB memory). The Fit-to-Stream feature means that music can be streamed and/or downloaded to cell phones, PDAs, office desktops, portable digital devices, car stereos, and in-home systems from just one file, said Ashdown.
"QDX is designed for both streaming and downloading at high and low end rates," he said. "This means that providers can get their music to lots of users without having to store to lots of different files for each song. For consumers, this means they can get the very best quality music for their particular type of online connection. It will also make it easy for consumers to transfer music they have bought and paid for from one device to another."
The QDesign and Apple QuickTime teams are working to make sure that QDX and Apple's multimedia technologies work together flawlessly, said Ashdown. Whether this results in QDX plug-ins for QuickTime 5 or making QDX "native" to QT is still being determined.
QDX, unveiled in July, is beginning to pick up steam as more companies come aboard, said Ashdown. For instance, Texas Instruments is supporting a version of QDX in two of its chips.
"QDX proper, as we refer to it, has a number of features that are a function of dynamic scalability and need to be implemented in a certain way," Ashdown said. "You can't automatically access all the features just because you can access the format. However, our hope is that as QDX is adopted into streaming architectures and used in more devices, the record companies will see the value of format and it will continue to grow."
