MP3 Through Times

MP3, which stands for MPEG Audio Layer 3, is a music audio format that has revolutionized the music world by starting a whole new culture, especially on the web. Every music lover is aware of the word ‘MP3’, but very few know the whys and hows of it.

How it all began - Karlheinz Brandenburg and Dieter Seitzer

It all began way back in 1977, when Karlheinz Brandenburg, a specialist in mathematics and electronics in Germany, started researching methods of compressing music. At the same time Prof. Dieter Seitzer of Erlangen-Nuremberg University, Germany, also began his struggle of trying to compress music over phone lines. It was the advancement of digital technology that had made them think of compressing music. They knew that existent music was almost impossible to send over phone lines. So, they wanted to produce a music file that was much smaller and yet sound the same as the original uncompressed audio.

Karlheinz Brandenburg and Dieter Seitzer continued working independently till 1987, when the Fraunhofer Institut in Germany undertook the research project under code-name EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). Both Karlheinz Brandenburg and Dieter Seitzer joined the project along with Bernhard Grill, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein. In 1989, the MP3 technology was finally developed and its patent (German) was obtained.  Meanwhile, in 1988, an international working group of ISO/IEC charged with the development of video and audio encoding standards, called the Motion Pictures Experts Group, or MPEG, was formed. MPEG soon started testing the various audio codecs submitted to it for approval. The ones that excelled in the testing were taken and further refined and integrated into one codec. It was here that Karlheinz Brandenburg’s and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was used as the basis and integrated into MPEG’s new audio codec. The new codec was released in 1992 as MPEG-1. The standard was later developed into MPEG-2 and published in 1994. The third version, MPEG Audio Layer 3, or MP3 was released on November 26, 1996, and the United States patent was issued. Fraunhofer Institut soon began asking for patent rights, and in September 1998 finally won. Now all developers of MP3 encoders/rippers and decoders/players have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.

First Music In MP3

In February 1999, SubPop became the first company to produce and distribute music tracks in the MP3 format. Soon after, the portable MP3 player appeared. The popularity of MP3 was now fast rising, especially on the internet. Time saw the music industry completely changed. No longer were music lovers rushing to stores as music could now be easily downloaded from the Internet or "ripped" from a music CD. Neither was there need to search for an audio CD that one wanted to hear, because now it was possible to store thousands of songs on a small portable player and then search by title, artist, album or genre. Whether at home or outside, all that had to be done to listen to a song was press a button.

MP3 Players

The MP3 Player also progressed with time. The very first commercially released Player was the MPMan F10, launched by Korea’s Saehan Information Systems in 1998. It was a 91 x 70 x 165.5 mm device that contained 32MB of Flash storage, and had to be connected to a parallel port on a PC to copy songs. Later the same year, another player, the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300 was released in the U.S. This, too, had 32MB of storage and had to be connected to a parallel port. The only difference was that it contained a Smart Media slot that allowed users to increase storage space. Despite the release and wide use of these MP3 players, the explosive growth came in 2003, when Apple allowed Windows PC owners to use the iPod, their new MP3 device. The initial iPod, released in 2001, was meant only for Macintosh users. It was the first hard-drive based device with 5 GB of space. Today there is a wide range of devices produced by hundreds of software companies the world over that users can select from, depending on their requirements.  These players may be categorized on the basis of their storage media – flash based, hard drive based, MP3 CD, and hybrid. The most popular players today (according to CNET) are Apple iPod, Microsoft Zune, Archos WiFi, Creative Zen, and iRiver Clix.

Limitations Of MP3 Give Birth To Other Audio Formats

Despite its unprecedented popularity, MP3 does have its limitations. Among them – time resolution is too low, it often creates echoes, coding efficiency is not very good due to double filter banks, no scale factor bands for high frequencies, and encoding delays due to internal handling of bit reservoir. Due to these deficiencies several new audio formats were developed. The most poplar of these alternatives to MP3 are AAC and WMA. These are just as widely supported as MP3 and do not have the limitations that MP3 has. Other audio formats that though are not as widely supported but are still popular because they are open sourced and completely free, are Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex.

Regardless of everything, MP3 continues to be the dominant music audio format and the favorite of music lovers. The reasons for this are simple – it is free, is easy to make, requires a much smaller saving space, and most music software include options to create or convert files to MP3. Today there are thousands of websites that offer MP3 music files for download, and millions of music lovers from all over the world are downloading music daily. Many sites are illegal, so in order to avoid risks and safety concerns, it is important to go for legal ones which have been sanctioned by the music industry. The most popular of these are Rhapsody, Napster, iTunes, eMusic, Amazon, and Epitonic.

This brings us to another point – the impact MP3 has had on this segment of the music industry, i.e. the distribution segment. The popularity of the internet and the rise in online music distribution has facilitated the entry of small firms into the field. In other words, barriers to entry have eased. The need for promotional activities has also lessened. This is because the music distribution websites allow consumers to view song clips thus allowing them to actually see/hear what they are buying. Production costs of producers have also been cut because of the downloading - not as many CDs have to be produced. Thus both the consumer and the producer have benefited from online music distribution – which was a result of MP3.       

It will not be wrong to say that MP3 has revolutionized the music industry. Since the time it has appeared, it has become a cultural phenomenon, something much more than mere technology. It has brought about a new era in the music industry.