Patent ID: 8082158

Claim:
A method of decoding an audio signal performed by an audio decoding system, comprising: receiving the audio signal, the audio signal including at least one frame, the frame comprising at least one time slot and at least one parameter set; determining a frame type of the audio signal, the frame type indicating that an interval of a time slot to which a corresponding parameter set is applied is variable distant, when the frame type indicates that the interval of the time slot is variable distant, performing operations comprising: extracting a number of time slots and a number of parameter sets from the audio signal to identify time slot information, the time slot information indicating a time slot to which a parameter set is applied; determining a bit length of the time slot information, the bit length being variable according to the number of time slots and the number of parameter sets; and extracting the time slot information based on the bit length, wherein a number of the time slot information is equal to the number of parameter sets; and decoding the audio signal based on the time slot information and the corresponding parameter sets, wherein the time slot information includes an absolute value indicating a time slot to which a first parameter set is applied or a difference value indicating a time slot to which a following parameter set of the first parameter set is applied, wherein the time slot to which the following parameter set is applied is determined by adding the difference value to previous time slot information associated with a previous parameter set.