Digital signal encoding/decoding method and apparatus through linear quantizing in each section

The present invention relates to a digital signal encoding / decoding method and apparatus using a piecewise linear quantization. The digital signal encoding method comprising the steps of: (a) converting a digital input signal to remove redundant information among signals; Step (b) in consideration of the importance of the signal to calculate the number of bits allocated for each predetermined quantization unit; And (c) for a given quantization units, dividing a distribution of signal values ​​at a predetermined interval linear quantizing the transformed data in the step (a) for each said interval; And (d) the linear quantized data and predetermined additional information, characterized in that it comprises the step of generating a bit stream. According to the present invention, it is possible, while improving the sound quality than a general linear quantizer in consideration of a distribution of audio data to reduce the complexity of the quantizer in a non-linear quantizer significantly.