High-quality and processor-efficient implementation of an MPEG-2 AAC encoder

Presents MPEG-2 AAC LC Profile encoder software for an Intel Pentium III processor. Modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) and quantization processing are accelerated by the use of SIMD instructions. Psycho-acoustic analysis in the MDCT domain makes the use of FFTs unnecessary. Better sound quality is provided by greater efficiency in quantization processing and Huffman coding. All of this results in high-quality and processor-efficient implementation of an MPEG-2 AAC encoder. Sound quality achieved at 96 kbps/stereo is significantly better than that of MP3 at the same bitrate. The encoder works 13 times faster than realtime for stereo encoding on an 800MHz Pentium III processor.