Astrid/Quartex AAC was one of the biggest lies that ever happened to the audio coding community (only surpassed by Mafuka).

The readme claims Astrid AAC is an AAC encoder based on MPEG-4 sources released by NTT (Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, the developers of VQF).

The reality is that Astrid AAC is far from being ISO AAC compliant. Actually, it's far from being AAC! The encoding routines are based on libraries stolen from Celestialtech's AudioLib (that used Lucent's PAC encoder). Not surprisingly, the original binaries were encrypted.

The binaries available here have been decrypted by me, if only because they can now be compressed better with Zip. They were encrypted with PELOCKnt, and I used peunlock to decrypt them.


Date: 1998
Version: 0.2 (decoder 0.1)
Interface: Command Line
Platform: Win32
Download: astrid.zip - 571Kb