The paper improves the reliability of audio streams in a lossy channel. The mechanism groups audio data samples into source and carrier sets. The carrier set carry the information about the source set which is encoded using data hiding methodology - quantization index modulation. At the receiver side, a missing source data sample can be reconstructed using the carrier set and the remaining source set. Based on reliability constraints a hybrid design combining interleaving and data hiding is presented. Experiments show an improved reliability as compared to forward error correction and interleaving.