Patent ID: 8670990

Claim:
A method for generating an encoded representation of an audio signal comprising a series of temporally-ordered segments, the method comprising, for each segment of the audio signal: selecting one of a plurality of different encoding modes; selecting one of a plurality of different time scale modification (TSM) compression ratios based on the selected encoding mode, wherein each of the plurality of different TSM compression ratios is greater than 1; applying TSM compression to the segment using the selected TSM compression ratio to generate a TSM-compressed segment; and applying encoding to the TSM-compressed segment in accordance with the selected encoding mode to generate an encoded TSM-compressed segment; wherein the encoded TSM-compressed segment includes one or more mode bits that are useable by a decoder to determine which encoding mode was used in encoding the TSM-compressed segment and which TSM compression ratio was used in applying TSM compression to the segment, wherein at least one of the selecting or applying steps is performed by a processing unit or an integrated circuit.