A wideband audio coding concept is presented that provides good audio quality at bit rates below 3 bits per sample with an algorithmic delay of less than 10 ms. The concept is based on the principle of Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) in an analysis-by-synthesis framework. A spherical codebook is used for quantisation at bit rates which are higher in comparison to low bit rate speech coding for improved performance for audio signals. For superior audio quality, noise shaping is employed to mask the coding noise. In order to reduce the computational complexity of the encoder, the analysis-by synthesis framework has been adapted for the spherical codebook to enable a very efficient excitation vector search procedure. Furthermore, auxiliary information gathered in advance is employed to reduce a computational encoding and decoding complexity at run time significantly. This auxiliary information can be considered as the SCELP codebook. Due to the consideration of the characteristics of the apple-peeling-code construction principle, this codebook can be stored very efficiently in a read-only-memory.