This software has been renamed from MIDAS Digital Audio System due to trademark issues.

Housemarque Audio System is a multichannel digital sound and music system, designed mainly for use in games, demos, and other realtime multimedia applications. HMQ Audio is free for non-commercial usage, but licenses for commercial use are also available.

In Win95/NT, both the standard multimedia APIs and DirectSound are supported. In addition to individual digitized sound samples, Housemarque can play digital audio streams and modules, for use as additional sound effects and background music. The supported module formats are:

• FastTracker 2 modules (.XM) with up to 32 channels
• Scream Tracker 3 modules (.S3M) with up to 32 channels
• Basic Protracker modules (.MOD) with 4 channels, also extended PT-like formats with up to 32 channels are supported.

Regardless of the capabilities of the sound card used, samples and streams can be played in any of the formats below:

• Uncompressed 8-bit mono and stereo samples and streams
• Uncompressed 16-bit mono and stereo samples and streams
• Compressed 8-bit µ-law mono and stereo samples and streams, with sound quality almost equivalent to uncompressed 16-bit data
• Compressed 4-bit ADPCM mono and stereo streams, with sound quality better than uncompressed 8-bit data