Brief Background and History of MP3 Technology

You've probably seen almost everyone plugged into their MP3 player these days. They're working out at the gym, out jogging, riding their bikes, grocery shopping, waiting to see their dentist, taking the bus or just hanging out - and they're all plugged into their own sound. If you don't have an MP3, you probably wonder what is this really all about? And, how does it work? Well, here are a few answers.

WHAT IS MP3?

MP3 is part of MPEG (Motion Pictures Expert Group), a family of standards for displaying video and audio.

"MP3" stands for MPEG Audio Layer III – the accepted standard for audio compression. It makes any music file much smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. An MP3 file is typically about 1/10th to 1/12th the size of the original CD file created from the same audio source. In other words, MP3 is the technology that lets you store a tremendous number of songs in a very, very small player.

Today, inexpensive 40GB MP3 players can hold more than 16,000 CD quality songs. And, that's just the beginning. The Sansa e200 Series MP3 player, for example, has memory expansion slots that can hold up to a huge 8GB capacity. It lets you carry what would take up enormous boxes of CDs and DVDs in one small player. You can have access to your complete collection no matter where you are - or what you're doing.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

MP3 uses what is called a "lossy compression algorithm" to greatly reduce the amount of data without losing sound quality. MP3 files sound like the original to most listeners. It works by reducing the accuracy of certain parts of sound that most people can't hear anyway. It gets rid of the sound frequencies that the average human ear is incapable of hearing. This method is commonly referred to as Perceptual Coding.

HOW DO I PUT STUFF ON MY MP3? HOW DO I CONVERT MY AUDIO/VIDEO TO MY MP3?

Your MP3 will work with your PC to let you transfer music or videos from your CD and DVD collection. You can also go online and download files directly from a number of Internet sites - some offer free music, some charge a fee and some are subscription based. Once you get it loaded, you can search your files in a number of ways to find something specific. You can utilize play lists to hear a mixture of things.

DO ALL MP3s WORK FOR BOTH VIDEO AND AUDIO?

Originally, MP3 involved only audio compression. Today, however, there are players such as the Sansa View that marries full MP3 player capabilities with full-motion video support.

WHO INVENTED MP3?

The German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft developed MP3 technology and now licenses the patent rights to the audio compression technology. The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.

In 1987, the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen research center began researching high quality, low bit-rate audio coding, a project named EUREKA. The Fraunhofer Institut was helped with their audio coding by Dieter Seitzer, a professor at the University of Erlangen. Dieter Seitzer had been working on the quality transfer of music over a standard phone line. The Fraunhofer research was led by Karlheinz Brandenburg often called the "father of MP3".

Karlheinz Brandenburg was a specialist in mathematics and electronics and had been researching methods of compressing music since 1977. In an interview with Intel, Karlheinz Brandenburg described how MP3 took several years to fully develop and almost failed. Brandenburg stated "In 1991, the project almost died. During modification tests, the encoding simply did not want to work properly. Two days before submission of the first version of the MP3 codec, we found the compiler error."