Patent ID: 8073125

Claim:
A system for providing a spatial audio conference between a local party and one or more remote parties, wherein each party is situated at a different venue, and each party comprises either a single conferencee or a plurality of co-situated conferencees, comprising: a plurality of audio conferencing devices (ACDs) which are interconnected by a network, wherein each venue comprises an ACD, and each ACD comprises: a general purpose computing device, an audio input device, and an audio output device; and a computer program having program modules executable by each ACD, comprising: a capture module for using the input device to capture spatial audio information from a captured sound-field emanating from the local party, and processing the captured audio information to generate a single audio data stream which comprises the captured audio information, a network communications module for transmitting the single audio data stream over the network to each remote party, and receiving a single audio data stream which is transmitted over the network from each remote party and which comprises captured spatial audio information from a captured sound-field emanating from the remote party associated with the received audio data stream, and a playback module for processing the audio data stream received from each remote party to generate a plurality of output audio signals, and rendering said output audio signals through the output device to produce a playback sound-field which is perceived by the local party, wherein the playback sound-field comprises the spatial audio information captured from the remote parties; wherein each audio data stream comprises: monaural audio data, and a captured sound-source identification (ID) metadata header which is appended to the monaural audio data, wherein the metadata header identifies one or more captured sound-sources for the monaural audio data.