Audio compression for network transmission

For real-time as well as off-line transmission of high quality audio signals over the Internet, the best quality at very low bit-rate is desired. MPEG-2 Layer 3 audio supports close to FM stereo quality (11 kHz bandwidth, 24 kHz sampling frequency) at 64 kbit/s total bit rate using advanced stereo coding techniques. The decoder supports real-time decoding on workstations or fast PCs. Different implementations of the encoder and the decoder and their use for Internet transmission of high quality audio are described.