Patent ID: 6952523

Claim:
A signal encoding method, comprising the steps of: encoding a signal to produce audio data, audio manager information for managing an audio title set including at least a track, audio title set information for accessing the track(s), and table-of-contents (TOC) information; formatting the audio data, the audio manager information, the audio title set information, and the table-of-contents (TOC) information encoded in the encoding step, to arrange the audio data in an audio pack of the track(s), to arrange the audio manager information in an area of an audio manager, 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 a table-of-contents (TOC) file, wherein said table-of-contents (TOC) file is independent of said audio title set information and is divided into a plurality of TOC groups which each include an audio pointer/pointers (SAPP #1 to #m) (m denotes a natural number) for pointing each track, wherein a musical composition containing the audio data is played back for each track by using the audio pointer pointing the track, and wherein each of the audio pointers has a pause time of the track pointed by the audio pointer; and outputting the audio data, the audio manager information, the audio title set information and the table-of-contents (TOC) information formatted in the formatting step.