We are artists and engineers who developed Quadraphonic Universally Accessible Resource Kit (QUARK) as a freely available software tool.
We kindly ask that you to please utilize this logo (or this for dark backgrounds), and the following text for your QUARK releases to inform listeners:
This record is QUARK encoded to play in both stereo and Regular Matrix quadraphonic sound.
QUARK is made possible by dublab & the National Endowment for the Arts.
If you post on services such as YouTube and Soundcloud that allow tagging, we suggest adding the tags #QUARK and #Quadraphonic so that people can know that they can decode your music. Our hope is one day that these tags will be adopted by playback devices for automatic decoding of your music.
The QUARK software plugin is used in Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) and similar platforms to encode four channels of discrete audio into two channels (standard stereo) audio then back four channels again, allowing the distribution of four-channel spatial recordings via widely accessible two-channel formats such as vinyl, radio, streaming video such as YouTube and music services such as iTunes and Spotify.
QUARK enables musicians, filmmakers and engineers to make spatial sound work via two channel distribution formats in the Regular Matrix format then monitor audio at the pre-encode, encode and decode phases so that these creatives may mix and master spatial sound work for distribution.
This project is currently in beta status. This means it’s actively being tested, but isn’t guaranteed to work in all situations. Think you’ve found a bug? Have a feature request? Please fill out our feedback form.
*Ableton Live users, please don’t forget to download Audio Routes & Solo Safe