The present invention provides a method and a system with which information embedded
in compressed digital audio data can be directly operated. An embodiment of the
system for embedding additional information in compressed audio data includes:
means for extracting MDCT (Modified Discrete Cosine Transform) coefficients from
the compressed audio data; means for employing the MDCT coefficients to calculate
a frequency component for the compressed audio data; means for embedding additional
information in the frequency component obtained in a frequency domain; means for
transforming into MDCT coefficients the frequency component in which the additional
information is embedded; and means for using the MDCT coefficients, in which the
additional information is embedded, to generate compressed audio data.