The subject matter includes systems, engines, and methods for generalizing
a class of Lempel-Ziv algorithms for lossy compression of multimedia. One
implementation of the subject matter compresses audio signals. Because
music, especially electronically generated music, has a substantial level
of repetitiveness within a single audio clip, the basic Lempel-Ziv
compression technique can be generalized to support representing a single
window of an audio signal using a linear combination of filtered past
windows. Exemplary similarity searches and filtering strategies for
finding the past windows are described.