Tuesday, June 14, 2011

15 years of .mp3 format

Yup, 15 years have passed! Cool, huh?
Patented in 1987, but it was named ".mp3" in 1995.

.mp3 was developed in institute "Fraunhofer" in Erlangen, Germany. There, the scientists were looking for best compression alogorithm, and the song used in experiments was Suzanne Vega - Tom's diner. :)

The idea was to separate and compress only parts of the song that can be registered by human ear. (Because every song has a lot of frequencies that can not be registered) Using this metod, thay "tricked" the ear by only playing registerable parts thus reducing the size to only 10% of the original size.

The name was given in a poll!

First .mp3 player was made in 1994, and when it was made, all major electronics manufacturers belived that it was too complicated and that will never catch on... Oh my, what a mistake...

In 1995, poll was taken among employees in order to name this extension... The original name was (and still is) ISO MPEG Audio layer 3, but it was too long and complex, so they came up with name ".mp3".

So for listentng to our favorite music in mp3, we need to thank "zee Germans"!


18 comments:

Patres said...

I love those stories of visionaires giving completely wrong predictions, like this, or Bill Gates saying 64 kilobytes of memory was more than enough for computers.

Mikael B said...

What should we have done without that .format? :D

Anonymous said...

Had no idea, nice info

Anonymous said...

I had no idea. Thank you.

Jesse Crows said...

wow i cant believe its been 15 years!

Patti D. said...

Hey, I had that topic in the pipeline for my blog!!! :(

You can visit my blog here.

ExoticBlogger said...

long history!

Unknown said...

Amazing to think about.

Platano: 365 life said...

nice random fact... i would have never known this

Unknown said...

damn didnt even think about it.....i remember using a discman that could hold only 12-15 songs.

ReMs said...

guess those ppl that said it wouldnt catch on, must be pulling the hair

#19 said...

That's amazing to me that it's been 15 years, considering I use them daily :)

Ferko Mrkvička said...

..and I thought mp3 is here only like 7years lol

|sªMª®µ said...

good one

Carm said...

Cool. .mp3 IS a cool extension name, I mean as far as they go.

Unknown said...

nice info!

Douglas said...

Wow, I did not know that! Mp3 has quite the history!

Hélder Rocha said...

Nice topic :)

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