The History of The MP3
In 1987, with a project named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), the prestigious Fraunhofer Institut
Integrierte Schaltungen research center (a division of the German Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft firm) began researching high-quality, low bit-rate
audio coding. Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft now owns the licensing and the patent rights to the audio compression technology that was developed,
a technology better known as MP3.
Dieter Seitzer and Karlheinz Brandenburg
The inventors named on the United States Patent 5,579,430 for a "digital encoding process," a.k.a. MP3, are Bernhard
Grill, Karlheinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein but the two names most frequently associated with the development
of MP3 are Karlheinz Brandenburg and University of Erlangen professor Dieter Seitzer. A specialist in mathematics and electronics, Brandenburg, who is often called the "father of MP3", led the Fraunhofer
research. Brandenburg had been researching methods of compressing music since 1977. Seitzer, who'd been working on the quality transfer
of music over a standard phone line, joined the project as an audio coder.
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What is MP3?
MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer III, a standard for audio compression that makes any music file smaller with little or
no loss of sound quality. MP3 is part of MPEG, an acronym for Motion Pictures Expert Group, which is a family of standards for displaying
video and audio using lossy compression (in which random partial data is irreversibly discarded, allowing the remainder to represent a
compressed version of the original).
Standards set by the Industry Standards Organization (ISO), were launched in 1992 with the MPEG-1. MPEG-1 is a video
compression standard with low bandwidth, VCD is 352 x 240 resolution, The high bandwidth audio and video compression standard of MPEG-2 followed
and was of adequate quality for use with DVD technology. MPEG Layer III or MP3 involves audio compression only.
Fast Facts: History of MP3 Timeline
1987: - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio
Broadcasting (DAB).
January 1988: - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International
Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
April 1989: - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3.
1992: - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer's audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1.
1993: - MPEG-1 standard was published.
1994: - MPEG-2 was developed and published a year later.
November 26, 1996: - A United States patent for MP3 was issued.
September 1998: - Fraunhofer began enforcing their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and
decoders/players must now pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer, however, no licensing fees are required to simply use an MP3 player.
February 1999: - A record company called SubPop was the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.
1999: - Portable MP3 players make their debut. also the infamous Napster P2P appeared in june on the internet, and
lasted for two years
What Can MP3 Do?
According to Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, "Without data reduction, digital audio signals typically
consist of 16-bit samples recorded at a sampling rate that has to be at least twice the max 20khz audio frequency (e.g. 44.1 kHz for Compact Discs).
So you end up with more than 1.400 Mbit, or 176,000 bytes per second to represent just one second of stereo music in CD quality, a 5
minute CD song is around 50 mbyte. MP3 can compress a song by a factor of 10 or 12 and still retain something close to CD quality. So a
3 minute 30-megabyte sound file from a CD reduces to 3 megabytes or so in MP3. The encoder reorganizes repetitive and redundant data in the
recording, and compressing the rest of the song with well-known compression techniques shrinks the song considerably.
Most MP3 encoding software allows the user to select the bit rate when converting files into the MP3 format. The lower
the bit rate, the more information the encoder will discard when compressing the file. Bit rates range from 96 to 320 kilobits per second (Kbps).
Using a bit rate of 128 Kbps usually results in a sound quality equivalent to what you'd hear on the radio. Many music sites and blogs urge
people to use a bit rate of 160 Kbps or higher if they want the MP3 file to have the same sound quality as a CD.
MP3 Players
In the early 1990s, Frauenhofer developed the first MP3 player, but it was a bust. In 1997, developer Tomislav Uzelac
of Advanced Multimedia Products invented the first successful MP3 player, the AMP MP3 Playback Engine. Soon after, two university students,
Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev, ported AMP to Windows to create Winamp. In 1998, Winamp became a free MP3 music player, which took the
success of MP3 to a whole new level.
Napster
Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. Initially, Napster was
envisioned by Fanning as an independent peer-to-peer file sharing service. The service operated between June 1999 and July 2001.
Its technology allowed people to easily share their MP3 files with other participants. Although the original service was shut down by
court order, the Napster brand survived after the company's assets were liquidated and purchased by other companies through
bankruptcy proceedings
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