ISO/IEC TR 14496-24:2008 describes the desired joint behavior of MPEG-4 Systems (MPEG-4 File Format) and MPEG-4 Audio codecs. It is desired that MPEG-4 Audio encoders and decoders permit finite length signals to be encoded to a file (particularly MPEG-4 files) and decoded again to obtain the identical signal, subject to codec distortions. This will allow the use of audio in systems implementations (particularly MPEG-4 Systems), perhaps with other media such as video, in a deterministic fashion. Most importantly, the decoded signal will have nothing "extra" at the beginning or "missing" at the end.