The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for processing a signal, which are used for effectively reproducing a multimedia signal, and more particularly, to a method and an apparatus for processing a signal, which are used for implementing filtering for multimedia signal having a plurality of subbands with a low calculation amount. To this end, provided are a method for processing a multimedia signal including: receiving a multimedia signal having a plurality of subbands; receiving at least one proto-type filter coefficients for filtering each subband signal of the multimedia signal; converting the proto-type filter coefficients into a plurality of subband filter coefficients; truncating each subband filter coefficients based on filter order information obtained by at least partially using characteristic information extracted from the corresponding subband filter coefficients, the length of at least one truncated subband filter coefficients being different from the length of truncated subband filter coefficients of another subband; and filtering the multimedia signal by using the truncated subband filter coefficients corresponding to each subband signal and an apparatus for processing a multimedia signal using the same.