The ISO/MPEG Audio MISICAM family

In the past decade a lot of work was dedicated to the difficult issue of data compression both for video and audio. For digital storage media, ISO/IEC JTCI/SC29/WGII alias MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group) succeeded in finding a common consensus among all the solutions and principles in order to finalist: a generic coding method for moving pictures and associated audio at up to about 1.5 Mbit/s. In November 1992. a new international standard consisting of three distinct parts, audio, video and system, was issued by MPEG: IS-11172 or MPEG1 standard. This paper introduces the main characteristics of this new standard concerning the audio part and mainly concentrates on the so-called MUSICAM family which concerns the first two audio layers. We first recall MPEG1-Audio main features and then we present the extension to the half sampling rates and to multichannel coding