REARRANGEMENT AND RATE ALLOCATION FOR COMPRESSING MULTICHANNEL AUDIO

摘要

Provided are methods and systems for rearranging a multichannel audio signal into sub-signals and allocating bit rates among them, such that compressing the sub-signals with a set of audio codecs at the allocated bit rates yields an optimal fidelity with respect to the original multichannel audio signal. Rearranging the multichannel audio signal into sub-signals and assigning each sub-signal a bit rate may be optimized according to a criterion. Existing audio codecs may be used to quantize the sub-signals at the assigned bit rates and the compressed sub-signals may be combined into the original format according to the manner in which the original multichannel audio signal is rearranged.