Happy Birthday MP3!

[JSmith]

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/the-u-s-patent-for-mp3-audio-was-granted-on-this-day-in-1996-laying-the-foundations-for-peer-to-peer-music-sharing-itunes-and-todays-streaming-services

On this day in 1996, a freshly inked U.S. patent quietly laid the cornerstone of the digital music revolution. In addition to facilitating this now vast internet-based entertainment business, the humble MP3 file format would propel broadband proliferation, usher in the iPod era, and arguably precipitate the iPhone and all the other touchscreen-slabs that remain indispensable gadgets to this day.

MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) files were devised by scientists to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent an audio file. Key personnel behind the invention of MP3 included: Bernhard Grill, Karlheinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, Ernst Eberlein, and Dieter Seitzer. Brandenburg is often credited as being the father of MP3, for leading this and similar research since 1977, but Seitzer (for example) brought expertise in transferring music over standard phone lines.

The MP3 file format patent expired in 2017, and is an old legacy codec, now largely a symbol of an iconic era in media and internet history. For the same purpose – digitizing physical music media – it has been usurped by modern alternatives like AAC and FLAC.

The pioneers of perceptual compression codecs... where would the world be today without the work they all did. Gosh, 29 years!


JSmith

 

[solderdude]

The pioneers of perceptual compression codecs... where would the world be today without the work they all did. Gosh, 29 years!

At worst we would have needed to wait 25 years for MQA

 

[Ropeburn]

At worst we would have needed to wait 25 years for MQA

Schrödinger's codec: lossy and lossless at the same time

 

[mermayer]

I can still remember the day I sat in the IBM office and downloaded the first MP3 song and listened to it via the command line on my desktop PC.

 

[Mr. Swordfish]

1996? My recollection is that we were using MPEG Layer 2 earlier than that over ISDN lines. Layer 1 and Layer 3 were defined, but nobody used Layer 1 and Layer 3 was only needed for really low bitrate situations.

I guess the patent for mp3 was awarded in '96, but it had been around for five years or so before that. Happy Birthday anyway.