Abstract: In digital audio decoding, the compressed data of the first two channels of a frame of MPEG multichannel audio are received, parsed and stored in plural spaced sub-blocks of buffer memory. Then, coding information of the same frame is received and interpreted. If the signal includes MPEG-2 multichannel audio, then compressed data of the remaining channels of the frame are received, parsed and interleaved in the sub-blocks. The sub-blocks are read from the buffer and decoded, sub-block by sub-block, transformed into decoded output data of all of the channels for simultaneous output to output devices. Less than 8K-bits read to local memory can be decoded to produce full multiple channel output. A memory controller accesses non-contiguous areas of the buffer memory and reads and writes differing sizes of data blocks. Substantial savings in both on and off chip memory are provided.