The Fraunhofer Institut had been working on its lossy audio compression tech for phone line transmission since 1977.
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(Image credit: Getty Images / Spencer Platt) 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.
Central to this digital audio format’s success was its ability to shrink audio files by 75%-95%. It did this by using now familiar lossy media compression techniques. In other words, the MP3 audio codec discarded audio data to achieve significant file size reductions, with little perceptible difference in listening quality due to the perceptual limitations of human hearing. Depending on the target listening device, users could change compression bit rates, though audiophiles often insisted they could hear the difference between raw CD audio source data, or indeed, vinyl.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- 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#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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