An audio signal encoding method performed by an encoder includes identifying an audio signal of a time domain in units of a block, generating a combined block by combining i) a current original block of the audio signal and ii) a previous original block chronologically adjacent to the current original block, extracting a first residual signal of a frequency domain from the combined block using linear predictive coding of a time domain, overlapping chronologically adjacent first residual signals among first residual signals converted into a time domain, and quantizing a second residual signal of a time domain extracted from the overlapped first residual signal by converting the second residual signal of the time domain into a frequency domain using linear predictive coding of a frequency domain.

An audio signal encoding method performed by an encoder includes identifying an audio signal of a time domain in units of a block, generating a combined block by combining i) a current original block of the audio signal and ii) a previous original block chronologically adjacent to the current original block, extracting a first residual signal of a frequency domain from the combined block using linear predictive coding of a time domain, overlapping chronologically adjacent first residual signals among first residual signals converted into a time domain, and quantizing a second residual signal of a time domain extracted from the overlapped first residual signal by converting the second residual signal of the time domain into a frequency domain using linear predictive coding of a frequency domain.

In multichannel audio coding, an improved coding efficiency is achieved by the following measure: the noise filling of zero-quantized scale factor bands is performed using noise filling sources other than artificially generated noise or spectral replica. In particular, the coding efficiency in multichannel audio coding may be rendered more efficient by performing the noise filling based on noise generated using spectral lines from a previous frame of, or a different channel of the current frame of, the multichannel audio signal.

In multichannel audio coding, an improved coding efficiency is achieved by the following measure: the noise filling of zero-quantized scale factor bands is performed using noise filling sources other than artificially generated noise or spectral replica. In particular, the coding efficiency in multichannel audio coding may be rendered more efficient by performing the noise filling based on noise generated using spectral lines from a previous frame of, or a different channel of the current frame of, the multichannel audio signal.

A very coarse quantization exceeding the measure determined by the masking threshold without or only very little quality losses is enabled by quantizing not immediately the prefiltered signal, but a prediction error obtained by forward-adaptive prediction of the prefiltered signal. Due to the forward adaptivity, the quantizing error has no negative effect on the prediction on the decoder side.

A very coarse quantization exceeding the measure determined by the masking threshold without or only very little quality losses is enabled by quantizing not immediately the prefiltered signal, but a prediction error obtained by forward-adaptive prediction of the prefiltered signal. Due to the forward adaptivity, the quantizing error has no negative effect on the prediction on the decoder side.

An audio signal coding apparatus includes a time-frequency transformer that outputs sub-band spectra from an input signal; a sub-band energy quantizer; a tonality calculator that analyzes tonality of the sub-band spectra; a bit allocator that selects a second sub-band on which quantization is performed by a second quantizer on the basis of the analysis result of the tonality and quantized sub-band energy, and determines a first number of bits to be allocated to a first sub-band on which quantization is performed by a first quantizer; the first quantizer that performs first coding using the first number of bits; the second quantizer that performs coding using a second coding method; and a multiplexer.

This quantization scale factor determination device is provided with a correction circuit which corrects an initial value of a quantization scale factor on the basis of whether or not an audio signal spectrum is sparse, and a search circuit which searches for a quantization scale factor on the basis of the initial value.

This quantization scale factor determination device is provided with a correction circuit which corrects an initial value of a quantization scale factor on the basis of whether or not an audio signal spectrum is sparse, and a search circuit which searches for a quantization scale factor on the basis of the initial value.

An audio transmitter processor for generating an error protected frame using encoded audio data of an audio frame, the encoded audio data for the audio frame having a first amount of information units and a second amount of information units, has: a frame builder for building a codeword frame having a codeword raster, wherein the frame builder is configured to determine a border between a first amount of information units and a second amount of information units so that a starting information unit of the second amount of information units coincides with a codeword border; and an error protection coder to obtain a plurality of processed codewords representing the error protected frame.