Qualcomm’s aptX and aptX HD audio codecs are free to use on Android

Over the past few days, Qualcomm has made a rather interesting decision: it has open sourced i codec aptX e aptX HD, which are two codecs that aim to improve the sound quality as well as make the files lighter. But what does all this mean? In practice, Qualcomm has published the source code of the two codecs which, therefore, can be used and distributed completely free of charge. In fact, before this choice, the producers paid up to 6.000$ to use codecs.

The news was released by Mishaal Rahman, who precisely explained that manufacturers, before this move, had to pay Qualcomm a rather high fee to use the aptX and aptX HD audio codecs. In addition, now also software developers will be able to use these two algorithms in their own projects, perhaps even trying to introduce some improvements. However, Qualcomm clarified that the aptX products included in AOSP are encoders, so companies will still have to pay licensing fees to use other codec-related products.

The aptX audio codec was created in 1980 in research laboratories Queen’s University Belfast. Specifically, since it is based on rather effective algorithms, this codec allows much more data to be transported over Bluetooth connectivity than is normally possible: therefore, the quality is higher up to “resembling” that of a CD. Subsequently, some were developed from this codec variantsFor example aptX HDwhich allows listening to audio fino 48 kHz e a 24-bit.