Patent ID: 6999919

Claim:
A method for determining quantization step size (QSS) forte bit allocator component of an MPEG audio Layer 3 (MP3) encoder comprising the steps of: (a) determining if the first N frames of an audio signal have been sampled and are to be encoded; (b) if the first N frames are to be encoded, then calculating the QSS of those frames using a conventional quantization process; (c) if the first N frames have already been encoded, ten setting the QSS of a frame to be encoded to the calculated QSS of the previous frame; (d) performing iterative determination loops to modify QSS, wherein the requirements of the MP3 standard are satisfied; and (e) storing the modified QSS, wherein said modified QSS is used as the initial point of the next iterative determination; wherein the quantization step in steps (a)–(b) is calculated differently from the quantization step in steps (c)–(e).