Audio Signal Processing and Coding

11.6 SUMMARY OF COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS

Some of the popular applications (Table 11.4) for embedded audio coding include digital broadcast audio (DBA) [Stol93b] [Jurg96], direct broadcast satellite (DBS) [Prit90], digital versatile disc (DVD) [Crav96], high-definition television (HDTV) [USAT95b], cinema [Todd94], electronic distribution of music [Bran02] and audio-on-demand over wide area networks such as the Internet [Diet96]. Audio coding has also enabled miniaturization of digital audio storage media such as compact MiniDisc [Yosh94]. With the advent of the MP3 audio format, that denotes audio files that have been compressed using the MPEG-1 layer III algorithm, perceptual audio coding has become of central importance to overnetwork exchange of multimedia information. Moreover, the MP3 algorithm has been integrated into several popular portable consumer audio playback devices that are specifically designed for web compatibility. Streaming audio codecs have been developed by several commercial entities. Example codecs include RealAudio™, and atob™ audio. In addition, DolbyNET™ [DOLBY], a version of the Dolby AC-3 algorithm modified to accommodate Internet streaming [Vern99] has been successfully integrated into streaming audio processors for delivery of audio-on-demand to the desktop web browser. Moreover, some of the MPEG-4 audio tools enable real-time audio transmission over packet-switched networks such as the Internet [Diet96] [Ben99] [Liu99] [Zhan00], transparent compression ...