Lossless compression algorithms can only exploit redundancies of the original audio signal to reduce the data rate, but not irrelevancies as identified by psycho-acoustics. Lossless audio coding schemes apply a filter or transform for de-correlation and then encode the transformed signal. The encoded bit stream comprises the parameters of the transform or filter, and the lossless representation of the transformed signal. However, in case of lossy based lossless coding the additional amount of information exceeds the amount of data for the base layer by a multiple of the base layer data amount. Therefore the additional data cannot be packed completely into the base layer data stream e.g. as ancillary data. Several intermediate quality layers are possible. However, these data streams are not independent from each other. Every higher layer depends on the lower layers and can only be reasonably decoded in combination with these lower layers. According to the invention, a special combination of one-time header information with repeated header information in a block structure is used, which kind of combination depends on the type of application. Assignment information data identify the different parts or layers of the lossless format belonging to one input signal. Synchronisation data are used to combine the different data streams or parts or layers to a single lossless or intermediate output signal. These features are used in a file format and in a streaming format.