Sound decompressing apparatus providing improved sound quality during special reproducing such as forward search reproducing and reverse search reproducing

A sound decompressing apparatus comprising:

• an input determination section which detects an indication of forward search reproducing or reverse search reproducing;
• an input unit which input s sound frames, each of the sound frames being a compressed sound data unit;
• a frame skip section which selects sound frames inputted by the input unit at fixed or predetermined intervals when the input determination section detects an indication of forward search reproducing or reverse search reproducing;
• a sound decompressing unit which decompresses the sound frames selected by the frame skip section and outputs a sound signal;
• and
• a gain control section which changes a gain of the sound signal outputted by the sound decompressing unit when the input determination section detects an indication of forward search reproducing or reverse search reproducing.

A sound decompressing apparatus comprising:

• a bit stream unpacking section which inputs, for forward search reproducing or reverse search reproducing sound frames of a bit stream at fixed or predetermined intervals, each of the sound frames containing data of a fixed number of samples and being a compressed sound data unit, and which unpacks each of the sound frames into a header, a bit allocation of each band of a plurality of bands, a scale factor of each band, and quantized sample data divided into a plurality of frequency components of equal interval;
• a gain control section which calculates a new scale factor of each band based on the scale factor of each band unpacked by the bit stream unpacking section;
• a requantization section which requantizes the quantized sample data unpacked by the bit stream unpacking section based on the bit allocation of each band and the new scale factor of each band, and outputs requantized sample data;
• and
• a synthesis subband filter which synthesizes bands of the requantized sample data outputted by the requantization section.

An electronic camera comprising:

• a Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) AUDIO compression/decompression circuit which compresses/decompresses sounds;
• a Joint Photograph Experts Group (JPEG) compression/decompression circuit which compresses/decompresses still images;
• a control circuit which controls the MPEG AUDIO compression/decompression circuit and the JPEG compression/decompression circuit;
• and
• a search switch which gives an indication of forward search reproducing or reverse search reproducing;
• wherein when the search switch gives an indication of forward search reproducing or reverse search reproducing, the control circuit controls the MPEG AUDIO compression/decompression circuit to select compressed sound data at fixed or predetermined intervals, skip other compressed sound data, and decompress and reproduce the selected compressed sound data, and controls the JPEG compression/decompression circuit to decompress and reproduce a still image.