The paper offers an overview of the current state of development of modern audio data compression techniques covered by ISO/IEC 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio) standard and its latest amendments: bandwidth extension, parametric stereo, spatial audio, parametric coding and lossless coding. These extensions address specific demands for low bit rates, multi-channel sound and scalable to lossless representation of audio data. Examples of the performance of new techniques are given in order to illustrate the progress both in terms of compression efficiency and functionality.