During the last decade, new digital audio applications have emerged for network multimedia, wireless multimedia communication, and multimedia computing. In response of this need, considerable research has been devoted to the development of highfidelity digital audio. Several international or commercial digital audio standards are also presented, such as the ISO/MPEG family and the Dolby AC-3. Although these standards are publicly available, it does not mean they are free. Therefore, China own audio and video compression standard (AVS) is presented. In this paper, AVS audio coding and decoding technologies are discussed in some detail and concludes with a brief discussion of future research directions.