MPEG-4 ALS - The Standard for Lossless Audio Coding

The MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coding (ALS) standard belongs to the family MPEG-4 audio coding standards. In contrast to lossy codecs such as AAC, which merely strive to preserve the subjective audio quality, lossless coding preserves every single bit of the original audio data. The ALS core codec is based on forward-adaptive linear prediction, which combines remarkable compression with low complexity. Additional features include long-term prediction, multichannel coding, and compression of floating-point audio material. This paper describes the basic elements of the ALS codec with a focus on prediction, entropy coding, and related tools, and points out the most important applications of this standardized lossless audio format.