Classical
Discussing and discovering western classical music
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30 years of the MP3 format that changed the music industry forever.
30 years ago, in July 1995, representatives of the German Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen) decided to use the .mp3 extension for a new data encoding standard. The date of this event is considered to be the birthday of MP3.
It all started when a young scientist Karlheinz Brandenburg from the Friedrich Alexander Institute Erlangen-Nuremberg (Friedrich Alexander Universität) was searching for methods of audio compression.
At that time, music was recorded on CDs, which began to be widely distributed in 1982.
According to Brandenburg's own account, he experimented with the same song, “Tom's Diner” by Suzanne Vega. It was his favorite composition, which remained so even after listening to the track over 1000 times. Thus Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner is the first song converted to MP3. Suzanne Vega herself was later dubbed “the mother of MP3”.
The coding principle itself took into account the fact that in the uncompressed state of CD audio, a lot of unnecessary information for the ear is transmitted. The new compression principle used a method of masking individual sounds: a psychoacoustic model divided the entire frequency spectrum into parts with the same sound level and removed those that are not perceived by the human ear.
This made it possible to compress music tracks 11 times.
The word bitrate was used to denote the quality of compressed files. The highest quality MP3 sounds have a bitrate of 320 kbit/s, the minimum acceptable for encoding musical sound has a bitrate of 128 kbit/s. When recording human speech, files can be compressed to 96 kbps.
At first, the business did not see MP3 as a promising format.
The real success came after the developers put an encoder on the web. It allowed MP3 to encode audio that lasted only a minute. But one of the enthusiasts who downloaded the encoder was able to crack the utility and was able to compress audio of any length.
After that, MP3 quickly became a sought-after format, as it allowed the Internet community to transmit songs over slow dial-up connections.
By the way, the world's first pirated MP3 file: a rip of Metallica's “Until it Sleeps” was posted on an FTP server in 1996 by a user called NetFrack.
In 1999, the Napster site emerged - the largest portal with illegally distributed tracks.
There is a boom in sales of devices that allow you to play music in MP3 format. But the real sensation in the music industry was the iPod released in 2001 by Steve Jobs.
MP3 played a big role in the development of the Internet. Many streaming services and websites were created thanks to it. 0 reply
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