Streaming over the Internet with a scalable parametric audio coder

Audio compression has progressively gained higher importance in the Internet thanks to massive amount of multimedia services on it. This new services require coders adapted to that new environment. Therefore, new generation coders use more complex models focused on features which make possible its use for audio streaming over the Internet, mainly low bit rate, scalability and robustness. In our case, a good trade-off between bit rate reduction and audio quality is achieved by using parametric audio coding, and furthermore, this coder has a scalable version, optimized for streaming requirements. This coder avoids differential information between coded audio segments and uses a layered scheme for changing straightforwardly the bit rate. The results reveal our coder as a good candidate for massive distributed audio applications, like music on demand, radio broadcasting or real-time streaming audio. In this article are shown the main features of this coder and their implication on streaming.