This paper presents a generalized mixed-radix decimation-in-time (DIT) fast algorithm for computing the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) of the composite lengths N=2 x q(m), m >= 2, where q is an odd positive integer. The proposed algorithm not only has the merits of parallelism and numerical stability, but also needs less multiplications than that of type-IV discrete cosine transform (DCT-IV) and type-II discrete cosine transform (DCT-II) based MDCT algorithms due to the optimized efficient length-(N/q) modules. The computation of MDCT for composite lengths N=q(m) x 2(n), m >= 2, n >= 2, can then be realized by combining the proposed algorithm with fast radix-2 MDCT algorithm developed for N=2(n). The combined algorithm can be used for the computation of length-12/36 MDCT used in MPEG-1/-2 layer III audio coding as well as the recently established wideband speech and audio coding standards such as G.729.1, where length-640 MDCT is used. The realization of the inverse MDCT (IMDCT) can be obtained by transposing the signal flow graph of the MDCT. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.