Although the AMR-WB+ coder provides excellent quality for speech signal, its coding model for music signals is not as optimal as the HE-AAC v2. The main causes of the poor quality of the AMR-WB+ TCX are the non-critical sampling and block artifacts. The new TCX windowing scheme proposed in this paper uses an MDCT with a 50% frame overlap, so that the problems of non-critical sampling and blocking artifacts are significantly mitigated. Due to long overlaps, the proposed scheme involves an additional codec delay. It is, however, moderate for audio services. The results of objective and subjective tests indicate that the proposed scheme achieves noticeable quality improvements for music signals over the previous TCX schemes.

This paper proposes an efficient FFT algorithm for the Psycho-Acoustic Model (PAM) of MPEG-4 AAC. The proposed algorithm synthesizes FFT coefficients using MDCT and MDST coefficients through circular convolution. The complexity of the MDCT and MDST coefficients is approximately half of the original FFT. We also design a new PAM based on the proposed FFT algorithm, which has 15% lower computational complexity than the original PAM without degradation of sound quality. Subjective as well as objective test results are presented to confirm the efficiency of the proposed FFT computation algorithm and the PAM.