Patent ID: 8463605

Claim:
A method of processing an audio signal, the method comprising: receiving, via an information receiving unit, a downmix signal generated by downmixing at least one object, object information indicating attributes of the at least one object included in the downmix signal, and mix information; generating, via an information generating unit, multi-channel information using at least one of the object information and the mix information; generating, via the information generating unit, first gain information or extra multi-channel information including second gain information by using at least one of the object information and the mix information, according to a decoding mode; and generating, via a multi-channel decoder, a multi-channel signal by using the downmix signal, the multi-channel information, and the one of the first gain information and the extra multi-channel information, wherein the multi-channel information is used to upmix the downmix signal to the multi-channel signal, and wherein the first gain information indicates a ratio of a user gain calculated based on the object information and the mix information to an object level calculated from the object information.