Macintosh Audio Compression/Expansion

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 - E.G, on Windows platform, it can only be ancoded and played in QuickTime
• Won't work on bit depths other than 8bit.

External Links

• QuickTime plays and encodes MACE streams.
• Reverse engineered MACE decoder sources by Laszlo Torok