Qualcomm has open sourced its aptX and aptX HD encoders

Wireless audio is good.<p>But the one freaking thing I cannot understand is why after almost 20 years of wireless audio in computers, the microphone quality is still atrocious.<p>Anyway, I know the next version of Bluetooth will fix it.

Reminder that &quot;aptX is not as good as the advertisements say&quot;, &quot;SBC codec is OK&quot; and &quot;LDAC is a marketing fluff&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;habr.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;post&#x2F;456182&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;habr.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;post&#x2F;456182&#x2F;</a>

&quot;As per our usual business processes, the licensing of aptX, Snapdragon Sound and the underlying technologies, will continue to remain unchanged apart from contributing the aptX and aptX HD encoders to AOSP.&quot;<p>Open source != free to use anywhere. (In this case)

In a sort of off topic question which I had for two years now. If the world, or vast majority of the world are using wireless headphone or speakers. And all using codec with the Bluetooth profiles. Shouldn’t we just encode the original music ( Original as in Spotify and Apple Music ) with those codec to avoid conversion lost? Even AAC on Bluetooth headset are not pass through.<p>Right now everything you listened to on wireless are being re-encoded and decided on the fly.

AptX (even the non-LL one) is the only codec I know that has acceptable latency where it&#x27;s even good enough for gaming.<p>Sony WH-1000XM3 had AptX, WH-1000XM4 does not and other latest generation ANC headphones also do not.<p>So headphones from 5 years ago are more useful than modern ones. Modern ones are so bad, if you stop a song you hear the song still playing a bit after you pressed stop.<p>Might this open sourcing increase the likelihood of acceptable-latency first-tier ANC headphones again?<p>Or are they still going to be like &quot;open source is too open, let&#x27;s keep using my own high latency proprietary codec anyway and add a few ancient even higher latency ones like SBC for compatibility&quot;

As some of the commenters noted: what about patent grants?

Reading between the lines - decoders aren’t included, which would seem to suggest that you will still need Qualcomm patents for that. Maybe I’m misreading?

Feel like this makes the most sense with so many vendors moving to LDAC due to its inclusion in AOSP, and Google Pixel phone not having aptX at all.

aptX is still free to implement on the encoding side, like on Windows or macOS or Android, but you need a Qualcomm chip on the decoding side, like on earphones or speakers, so I wonder if it makes much difference even if the decoding side becomes open source.

Isn’t Bluetooth LE Audio supposed to be the one standard to rule them all?<p>I was really hoping to see more handset and headset supporting it, but its news seem to have fizzled out.<p>Anyone in the industry is able to share news there? Do we just need to wait? Is it encumbered in patents or too expensive to implement?

This is excellent news, aptX HD in particular is a great sweet spot for latency (for video), high enough quality, and robust enough encoding to avoid dropouts.

aptX HD is one of the greatest things happened with Android ecosystem. One day I just bought a cheap BT-receiver with aptX HD support and optical output and connected it to my old-fashioned music system (receiver + amp + floorstanding speakers connected by wires). The music quality became so much better compared to 3.5mm jack and I can listen all the music from the internet in my room with decent result.

<i>&gt; aptX and aptX HD codecs are proprietary to Qualcomm, so OEMs would previously acquire them directly from them.</i><p>It&#x27;s not enough Qualcomm try to get parasitic fees for existing free codecs (they tried attacking Opus I think), they also want to charge for their own NIH ones? How Qualcomm like.

Hmm I hope this improves support for them. Which is fairly lacking right now

Aside question: what if I write an aptX decoder from scratch just looking at the source text of encoder? Will it be an independent or derivative work?

They didn&#x27;t release the sources for aptX Lossless though, still seems like a good start

Is CD quality audio (16&#x2F;44) not doable without aptX?