The invention relates to a method for determining an encoding parameter for an audio channel signal of a multi-channel audio signal, the method comprising: determining for the audio channel signal a set of functions from the audio channel signal and a reference audio signal; determining a first set of encoding parameters based on a smoothing of the set of functions with respect to a frame sequence of the multi-channel audio signal, the smoothing being based on a first smoothing coefficient; determining a second set of encoding parameters based on a smoothing of the set of functions with respect to the frame sequence of the multi-channel audio signal, the smoothing being based on a second smoothing coefficient; and determining the encoding parameter based on a quality criterion with respect to the first set of encoding parameters and/or the second set of encoding parameters.