We propose the application of a new transform-based coding method in conjunction with Golomb-Rice (G-R) codes to lower significantly the complexity, which can be used in various applications, e.g. the multiple description coding. The theoretical evaluations predict no important loss in compression performance, while the complexity is considerably reduced. Since GR codes are very fast and well suited for exponentially decaying distributions, they were implemented during the last decade in image and audio compressors. In all these schemes, the selection of the code parameter is performed presuming Laplacian distribution of prediction errors. We derive the selection method for the GR code parameter also for the case of Gaussian inputs.