Macintosh Audio Compression/Expansion

From Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase
Revision as of 11:44, 20 April 2005 by Rjamorim (talk | contribs) (Formatting)

MACE (Macintosh Audio Compression/Expansion) is a lossy, proprietary compression scheme developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh line of computers.

Technically, it's very similar to how ADPCM works.

It offers two compression modes: 6:1 (1/6th of the original file size, 235kbps) and 3:1 (1/3rd of the original file size, 470kbps). Quality is relatively poor. It only works on 8bit streams.

Visitors are encouraged not to use this codec, for several reasons:

  • There are better alternatives quality-wise (ADPCM, WavPack lossy, psychoacoustic codecs)
  • Proprietary codec and closed source - E.G, on Windows platform, it can only be played in QuickTime
  • Won't work on bit depths other than 8bit.


QuickTime is the only software for Windows that will play and encode MACE streams.

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