We propose an efficient audio transcoding algorithm that can convert audio streams from terrestrial digital television broadcasting service stations to those for terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting hand-held receivers. The proposed algorithm avoids the complicated psychoacoustic analysis by calculating the scalefactors of the bit-sliced arithmetic coding encoder directly from the signal-to-noise ratio parameters of the AC-3 decoder. The bit-allocation process is also simplified by cascading the nested distortion control loop. Through subjective evaluation, it is shown that the proposed algorithm provides comparable audio quality to tandem coding but it requires much smaller complexity.