The German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft
developed MP3 technology and now licenses the patent rights to the
audio compression technology – United States Patent 5,579,430 for a
“digital encoding process”. The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.
In 1987, the prestigious Fraunhofer
Institut Integrierte Schaltungen research center (part of Fraunhofer
Gesellschaft) began researching high quality, low bit-rate audio coding,
a project named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).
Dieter Seitzer and Karlheinz Brandenburg
Two names are mentioned most frequently
in connection with the development of MP3. 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.”
What is MP3
MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer III
and it is a standard for audio compression that makes any music file
smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. MP3 is part of MPEG, an
acronym for Motion Pictures Expert Group, a family of standards for
displaying video and audio using lossy compression. Standards set by the
Industry Standards Organization or ISO, beginning in 1992 with the
MPEG-1 standard. MPEG-1 is a video compression standard with low
bandwidth. The high bandwidth audio and video compression standard of
MPEG-2 followed and was good enough to use with DVD technology. MPEG
Layer III or MP3 involves only audio compression.
MP3 Players
In the early 1990s, Frauenhofer developed the first, however, unsuccessful MP3 player. In 1997, developer Tomislav Uzelac
of Advanced Multimedia Products invented the AMP MP3 Playback Engine,
the first successful MP3 player. Two university students, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev
ported AMP to Windows and created Winamp. In 1998, Winamp became a free
MP3 music player boosting the success of MP3. No licensing fees are
required to use an MP3 player.
