An apparatus including circuitry configured for: defining at least one parameter field associated with an input multi-channel audio signals, the at least one parameter field configured to describe at least one characteristic of the multi-channel audio signals; determining at least one spatial audio parameter associated with the multi-channel audio signals; and controlling a rendering of the multi-channel audio signals by processing the input multichannel audio signals using at least the at least one characteristic of the multi-channel audio signals and the at least one spatial audio parameter.

A system for and a method of controlling generation of a 3D audio stream are disclosed. The method comprises accessing an audio stream; determining a value of a feature associated with the audio stream; selecting one or more 3D control parameters from a set of 3D control parameters, the selecting being based on the value of the feature associated with the audio stream; and generating the 3D audio stream based on the selected one or more 3D control parameters. In some embodiments, the feature is a metric associated with a frequency distribution of correlations of the audio stream.

The present disclosure discloses an inter-channel phase difference parameter encoding method, where a current frame is obtained; a signal type and a previous IPD parameter encoding scheme of a previous frame are obtained; a current IPD parameter encoding scheme is obtained at least based on the signal type of the previous frame and the previous IPD parameter encoding scheme; and an IPD parameter of the current frame is processed based on the current IPD parameter encoding scheme.

An apparatus for generating an enhanced sound field description includes: a sound field generator for generating at least one sound field description indicating a sound field with respect to at least one reference location; and a meta data generator for generating meta data relating to spatial information of the sound field, wherein the at least one sound field description and the meta data constitute the enhanced sound field description. The meta data can be a depth map associating a distance information to a direction in a full band or a subband, i.e., a time frequency bin.

A multi-channel decoder for generating a binaural signal from a downmix signal using upmix rule information on an energy-error introducing upmix rule for calculating a gain factor based on the upmix rule information and characteristics of head related transfer function based filters corresponding to upmix channels. The one or more gain factors are used by a filter processor for filtering the downmix signal so that an energy corrected binaural signal having a left binaural channel and a right binaural channel is obtained.

The present document relates to audio coding systems. In particular, the present document relates to efficient methods and systems for parametric multi-channel audio coding. An audio encoding system configured to generate a bitstream indicative of a downmix signal and spatial metadata for generating a multi-channel upmix signal from the downmix signal is described. The system comprises a downmix processing unit configured to generate the downmix signal from a multi-channel input signal; wherein the downmix signal comprises m channels and wherein the multi-channel input signal comprises n channels; n, m being integers with m<n. Furthermore, the system comprises a parameter processing unit configured to determine the spatial metadata from the multi-channel input signal. In addition, the system comprises a configuration unit configured to determine one or more control settings for the parameter processing unit based on one or more external settings; wherein the one or more external settings comprise a target data-rate for the bitstream and wherein the one or more control settings comprise a maximum data-rate for the spatial metadata.

The present disclosure provides methods, devices and computer program products for encoding and decoding a stereo audio signal based on an input signal. According to the disclosure, a hybrid approach of using both parametric stereo coding and a discrete representation of the stereo audio signal is used which may improve the quality of the encoded and decoded audio for certain bitrates.

An apparatus for playing back an audio object associated with a position includes a distance calculator for calculating distances of the position to speakers or for reading the distances of the position to the speakers. The distance calculator is configured to take a solution with a smallest distance. The apparatus is configured to play back the audio object using the speaker corresponding to the solution.

A system and method that incorporates the subject disclosure may include, for example, receiving a multichannel audio stream; forming a front channel audio stream of the multichannel audio stream, including combining a first subset of audio channels of the multichannel audio stream to form the front channel audio stream; forming a surround channel audio stream of the multichannel audio stream including combining a second subset of audio channels of the multichannel audio stream to form the surround channel audio stream; providing the front channel audio stream to a primary set of speakers positioned in front of a listener and providing the surround channel audio stream to a supplemental speaker positioned behind the listener; and synchronizing the front channel audio stream and the surround channel audio stream. Additional embodiments are disclosed.

An audio decoder for providing at least four audio channel signals on the basis of an encoded representation is configured to provide a first residual signal and a second residual signal on the basis of a jointly encoded representation of the first residual signal and of the second residual signal using a multi-channel decoding. The audio decoder is configured to provide a first audio channel signal and a second audio channel signal on the basis of a first downmix signal and the first residual signal using a residual-signal-assisted multi-channel decoding. The audio decoder is configured to provide a third audio channel signal and a fourth audio channel signal on the basis of a second downmix signal and the second residual signal using a residual-signal-assisted multi-channel decoding. An audio encoder is based on corresponding considerations.