Reliable sources indicate that Apple's developer community has been blessed with two separate seeds of the upcoming QuickTime 7.6 update. The update is said to offer 5.1 audio, as well as several optimizations to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard and Windows users.

As usual, AppleInsider cites people familiar with the builds as saying that Apple has requested developers to “test the release extensively with multi-channel encoded audio tracks that feed unique content to each surround sound channel,” the article reads. In addition to this, Apple also wants devs hard at work on MPEG-1 testing, including encoding and playback. Apple's own AAC format and Lossless audio formats are also included as areas of focus in the new QuickTime beta builds, allegedly labeled A26.

The same source points out that QuickTime 7.6 is one the few remaining updates planned for Apple's existing QuickTime architecture, as QuickTime X is to arrive on the scene built inside Snow Leopard. QuickTime X is touted as a major change to the media playing app, boasting “optimized support for modern audio and video formats that should result in extremely efficient playback.”

Upon introducing Snow Leopard, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Bertrand Serlet, revealed that the company was tired of adding new features, and that it would focus on improving what it had at the moment.

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system,” he added.

Snow Leopard is known to deliver optimized performance for multi-core processors, tapping into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), but also enabling huge amounts of RAM memory to be deployed. The new, modern media platform known as QuickTime X will be one of the few new additions to Mac OS X Snow Leopard.