CSA Preface
Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).
This Standard supersedes CAN/CSA-ISO/IEC 14496-3-06 (adoption of ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005, third edition, 2005-12-01). At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 14496-3:2009 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC.
This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by the Technical Committee and has been approved as a National Standard of Canada by the Standards Council of Canada.
Scope
This part of ISO/IEC 14496 (MPEG-4 Audio) is a new kind of audio standard that integrates many different types of audio coding: natural sound with synthetic sound, low bitrate delivery with high-quality delivery, speech with music, complex soundtracks with simple ones, and traditional content with interactive and virtual-reality content. By standardizing individually sophisticated coding tools as well as a novel, flexible framework for audio synchronization, mixing, and downloaded post-production, the developers of the MPEG-4 Audio standard have created new technology for a new, interactive world of digital audio.
MPEG-4, unlike previous audio standards created by ISO/IEC and other groups, does not target a single application such as real-time telephony or high-quality audio compression. Rather, MPEG-4 Audio is a standard that applies to every application requiring the use of advanced sound compression, synthesis, manipulation, or playback. The subparts that follow specify the state-of-the-art coding tools in several domains; however, MPEG-4 Audio is more than just the sum of its parts. As the tools described here are integrated with the rest of the MPEG-4 standard, exciting new possibilities for object-based audio coding, interactive presentation, dynamic soundtracks, and other sorts of new media, are enabled.
Since a single set of tools is used to cover the needs of a broad range of applications, interoperability is a natural feature of systems that depend on the MPEG-4 Audio standard. A system that uses a particular coder - for example, a real-time voice communication system making use of the MPEG-4 speech coding toolset - can easily share data and development tools with other systems, even in different domains, that use the same tool - for example, a voicemail indexing and retrieval system making use of MPEG-4 speech coding. A multimedia terminal that can decode the Natural Audio Profile of MPEG-4 Audio has audio capabilities that cover the entire spectrum of audio functionality available today and into the future.
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