Patent ID: 6889000

Claim:
A signal encoding method, comprising the steps of: encoding a signal to produce audio data, audio manager information, audio manager menu data, audio title set information, and table-of-contents (TOC) information; formatting the audio data, the audio manager information, the audio manager menu data, the audio title set information, and the table-of-contents (TOC) information to arrange the audio data in an audio pack, to arrange the audio manager information in an area of an audio manager, to arrange the audio manager menu data in an area of an audio manager menu, to arrange the audio title set information in an area of an audio title set and to arrange the table-of-contents (TOC) information indicative of a position of the audio data in an area of a table-of-contents (TOC) file, said table-of-contents (TOC) file being independent of said the audio title set information, the table-of-contents (TOC) file containing an audio play pointer (SAPP) which has a start address of the audio data in the audio pack and attribute data of the audio pack, and the attribute data containing the number of quantization bits of the audio data for playing back a musical composition which contains the audio data; and outputting the audio data, the audio manager information, the audio manager menu data, the audio title set information, and the table-of-contents (TOC) information formatted in the formatting step.