Patent ID: 8498874

Claim:
A method of encoding a time-domain audio signal, the method comprising: at an electronic device, receiving the time-domain audio signal comprising at least one audio channel; at an audio encoding system of the electronic device, transforming the time-domain audio signal into a frequency-domain signal comprising a sequence of sample blocks for each of the at least one audio channel, wherein each sample block comprises a coefficient for each of a plurality of frequencies; at the audio encoding system of the electronic device, grouping the coefficients of each sample block into frequency bands; at a scale factor generator of the audio encoding system of the electronic device, for each frequency band of each sample block, determining a scale factor for the frequency band; at the audio encoding system of the electronic device, for each frequency band of each sample block, determining an energy of the frequency band; at the audio encoding system of the electronic device, for each frequency band of each sample block, comparing the energy of the frequency band for the sample block with the energy of the frequency band of an adjacent sample block; at a scale factor adjustment block of the audio encoding system of the electronic device, for each frequency band of each sample block, increasing the scale factor for the frequency band for the sample block if a ratio of the energy of the frequency band of the sample block to the energy of the frequency band of the adjacent sample block is less than a predetermined value; at a quantizer of the audio encoding system of the electronic device, for each frequency band of each sample block, quantizing the coefficients of the frequency band based on the scale factor for the frequency band; and at at least a bitstream multiplexer of the audio encoding system of the electronic device, generating an encoded audio signal based on the quantized coefficients and the scale factors.