Overview
Shimadzu LabSolutions and GCMSsolution raw data files (.lcd, .qgd)
are standard Microsoft OLE2 (Compound File Binary Format, CFBF)
containers - the same public container format used by legacy Microsoft
Office documents. Reading the container's stream tree is not reverse
engineering Shimadzu's own work; only the contents and layout of the
streams inside it are.
sample.qgd - CFBF/OLE2 container: GCMS Raw Data/ storage
sample.lcd - CFBF/OLE2 container: TTFL Raw Data/ or QTFL RawData/ storage
A .lcd file can be either of two unrelated instrument families
underneath (IT-TOF or QTOF) - the extension alone never tells you which;
see Format variants.
Pages
| Page | Covers | Status |
|---|---|---|
| OLE2 container | Shared container structure across all variants | Confirmed |
| GC-MS (.qgd) | .qgd scan index and payload encoding (profile and MRM modes) | Partial |
| LC-MS IT-TOF (.lcd) | .lcd IT-TOF scan header and run-length-encoded payload | Partial |
| LC-MS QTOF (.lcd) | .lcd QTOF centroid index and payload | Confirmed for the payload shape, with corrections |
| Known limitations | What's deliberately unresolved across all variants | - |
Clean-room provenance
Every byte-level claim on these pages came from binary analysis of
public mass-spectrometry datasets (PRIDE, MassIVE, and MetaboLights
accessions - see
CORPUS.md)
plus the public CFBF/OLE2 container specification. No Shimadzu SDK,
LabSolutions/GCMSsolution/GCsolution software, or other vendor tooling
was used at any point - see
CONTRIBUTING.md.
These pages are a curated summary. The full byte-level research record -
every field, every hypothesis tried and rejected, and the raw
verification evidence - lives in
docs/format/
in the repository.