Abstract: Today, even despite the huge increase of available processing power, the commercial OS are not able to guarantee the response time necessary to process a plurality of audio sources and output the results in a very short time without using additional means such as dedicated DSP or other processing elements such as FPGA. This problem is overcome by means of a system to process a plurality of audio sources, this system having at least a central processing unit CPU and input and output capabilities, this system being characterized in that, the central processing unit comprises at least two cores, each core representing a micro processing unit, at least one core being loaded with a standard operating system and at least one second core being loaded with a real-time operating system (RTOS) in charge of processing audio signals which comprise audio sources and audio outputs.

Abstract: An audio signal compression and decompression method and apparatus that provide lossless, realtime performance. The compression/decompression method and apparatus are based on an entropy encoding technique using multiple Huffman code tables. Uncompressed audio data samples are first processed by a prediction filter which generates prediction error samples. An optimum coding table is then selected from a number of different preselected tables which have been tailored to different probability density functions of the prediction error. For each frame of prediction error samples, an entropy encoder selects the one Huffman code table which will yield the shortest encoded representation of the frame of prediction error samples. The frame of prediction error samples is then encoded using the selected Huffman code table. A block structure for the compressed data and a decoder for reconstructing the original audio signal from the compressed data are also disclosed.