To make reproduction coinciding with an encoding system possible by discriminating an encoding means used for encoding information recorded on a recording medium.

At a recording operation time, when a recording start instruction is received, a system control part 36 confirms a present audio recording mode state and selects a prescribed encoding system by a user's selection command inputted from the encoding system incorporated in an audio compression- extension part 12 to the system control part 36 according to advance user's designation to start audio encoding. By generating the data by one packet, encoding system information is added to a prescribed position in the packet to be recorded on the recording medium 35 together with the audio data to perform the audio encoding till a user's recording end instruction. At a reproducing time, by the instruction of a reproducing start, the system control part 36 reads out a reproducing objective packet from the recording medium 35 and sets the encoding system recorded on the prescribed position and according to the above, a video compression-extension part 22 starts audio decoding in order opposite to a compression time to repeatedly perform the audio decoding till a user's reproducing end instruction.