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'MP3' Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary
Sachin Garg writes "The Data Compression News Blog
reports that on July 14th 2005, the name "MP3" celebrates its tenth anniversary.
On this day back in 1995, the researchers at
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated
Circuits IIS decided to use ".mp3" as the file name extension for their new
audio coding technology. Development on this technology started in 1987, in 1992
it was considered far ahead of its times, then MP3 became the generally accepted
acronym for the ISO standard IS 11172-3 "MPEG Audio Layer 3" and no other coding
method so far (2005) could uncrown MP3 as the popular standard for digital music on the
computer and on the Internet."
They make some vague claims, such as "we believe [the patent owners] are serving papers right now." Note the fact that they have no concrete examples of this happening. They just believe it is. Then: "it's believed that one Website Owner has recently settled out of court for several millions." Once again, no concrete example. Just a belief that this has happened.
But great scams always include a grain of truth, this one being that MP3's patent is owned by Thomson, and they have set licensing terms.
So my question is, does anyone KNOW of Thomson actually suing anyone or gearing up for a rash of suits as the spammers claim? And this is not "I believe they are" or "a friend knows a guy whose sister's boyfriend's cousin's hairdresser's uncle got sued by Thomson while removing a gerbil from Richard Gere's butt." Does anyone have any concrete info on Thomson enforcing their patents?
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
this is the overwhelming result of our poll: everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3! As a consequence, everyone please mind that for WWW pages, shareware, demos, and so on, the .bit extension is not to be used anymore. There is a reason for that, believe me :-)
.bit? Does it sound too short?
I wonder what is the reason for not using
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I still have a handfull of .mp2 files actually provided for free from the record companies...
... a record executive weeps.
...if you remember using WinPlay3 back in the day!
;-)
If you don't, well, maybe you were too young back then.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I thought based on its compression ratio this would just be the 1st anniversary for mp3. Granted some things in those 10 years are lost, but we can't remember everything can we?
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
it was considered? Unless you were at a university on their lines running network cards, I severely doubt your 2400 baud or even mindblowing 14.4kbps could handle 5 megs. Even the solid type storage formats couldn't handle much more thna a meg. considered. hmph. (walks away muttering old men phrases)
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
...but damn was downloading at 28.8kbps a pain. Ouch.
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
OGG and co. are still better - however they seem to stay #2 forever - mp3 is already everywhere. It's quasi a standard. Technology is not everything - unfortunately.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
So how long before the patent expires?
I love MP3... It allowed millions (including me) to pirate music (think Napster) with a standardized format. Yay!
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
In 1998, I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years. As part of the site, I included some low-quality
But check out what the group's manager said about the nascent format:
And the lawyer, on the broader issue of copyrights:
In the end, I got more free publicity for my little fan site than if I'd scattered flyers all over Dallas. I'll avoid whoring for hits in this post, though... I think you can figure out where to click if you're really interested.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
That is the perception, at least, on the internet. Music files will probably be "MP3" for a long time, just like Pepsi is often referred to generically as a "Coke." iTunes Music Store, for example, uses .m4a and .m4p (their AAC format) file extensions. Considering that iTunes Music Store sells so many of these files (hundreds of millions), and that iTunes (a popular cross-platform music player) rips by default to .m4a, and that .mp3 is clearly behind the curve of audio compression technology, the time may be coming soon when .mp3 is king in name only.
ogg?
is that something i can play on my iPod?
This is not the greatest
When I was eighteen,
I downloaded a very good CD,
A very good CD that took the whole night to grab,
We found it on IRC
My handle was brian_mcgee
We burned it at 2 times for free
When I was eighteen...
With apologies to Homer, 1995 seems so long ago now...
crazy dynamite monkey
...and it was great! Downloaded from a BBS, had a vague description. It was like reading one of those claims about sticking a feature-length TV-res movie in only 100MB now. Couldn't believe it. Had to try anyway. Was an eye-opener, and I knew the future of music would change right there and then.
:P
That said.. it immediately made me look for other solutions, as nobody else could play back MP3s, and ended up using a-law and mu-law codecs from Microsoft. Smaller files than plain WAVs, not bad quality %)
Note: I was working on sound effects back then and needed to compact them for a game. To this date, I still don't care much for CD rips and 'sharing' music
Apple's making music safe for people by providing DRM. Since it looks like we have to have DRM, it just seems like Apple is the company to do it. With Apple, you get the new Industry Standard for music and access to millions of songs at iTunes. It's time for MP3 and music piracy to die.
But this is Slashdot. All we want to know is if it supports OGG vorbis.
why didn't they just call it IS 11172-3? It just rolls off the tounge doesn't it? Then we could be all saying: "So how many IS 11172-3's do you have on your ipod?" That would be much easier.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -Hunter S. Thompson
...but damn is downloading at 28.8kbps a pain. Ouch.
Now all we need is an MP3 player included in a Linux distro.
Anyone know of a legal MP3 player or license for libmad?
About 7 years ago, I ripped all my CD's to MP3, amazed at how much precious HDD space I could save while accessing all my music via the same source! Now, here I am, in the hard disk gigacheap days, stuck with these lossy-format buggers while the new kids on the block rip to their slightly larger lossless formats. You lucky, spoiled bastards.
Alo, Salut, sunt eu, un haiduc, Si te rog, slashbots mea, primeste fericirea. Alo, alo, sunt eu Picasso, Ti-am dat beep, si sunt voinic, Dar sa stii nu-ti cer nimic.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Anyone have a list of significant technological patents that were granted in 1985 and 1986 and are due to expire by the end of next year?
I guess this means that all MS Dos/ CPM/ IBM DOS, IBM PC, etc patents are expired now.
The latest version Lame VBR mode yields the best sounding audio I've ever on heard on MP3 and it's virtually indistinguishable from a cd. I've never heard OGG though because I'm still in dial up and the file sizes are too much. How do the two compare?
Well done layer 3 audio guru's
Where do I send the Keg of soda and beer?
Assuming you will not share with anyone user 21.
Whats the drinking age your country.
Have a party. CONGRATS
Well done.
Good thing my dorm building had a T1. I moved in right after it was built and leeching was such a pleasure until the units became occupied with 24/7 leeches.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I first got wind of them on EFNet in late 1995. In #mp3 there were only a handful of users, and they were talking about WinPlay3 from the Fraunhofer site. The first songs I downloaded were cheeseball dance music tracks, and needed a Pentium 60 or 66 to play at full quality.
I have about 3 gigs of MP3s with file stamps dating back to early 1996.
Ah, the days of downloading MP3s from anonymous FTP sites on the newly installed LAN in my dormroom!
I think mine was Mustang Sally. I remember listening to it in Windows 95 OSR2 on a Compaq Armada 1585DMT notebook (P150 MMX.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Ha! My MP5 was made in 1985, that makes it TWENTY years old, and it *still* likes to rock 'n roll!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
This only happens for software patents, which travel near the speed of stupid. My hope is that 10 years old means only seven years left to public domain.
In the mean time, I'm using OGG and layer 2 for those cheap portable devices. It's strange makers of devices that retail for less than $100 would rather pay royalties on MP3 than have free players that use OGG. To make things "work for sure" for M$ users, they can include a CD with all the OGG tools needed, which are also free.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
As the author of the first publicly demoed MP3 player (in 1996), I enjoy this anniversary immensely.
:]
Now for the trivia questions:
What CD was used for the demo?
Who demoed it?
What two applications were used to produce the MP3's?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I find your thoughts very intriguing and would like to subscribe to your podcast (in WMA©-format).
^^^ CaptchaSolva 0.5rc3
Image: http://images.slashdot.org/hc/79/a597575f3dae.jpg
Alphabet: [0-9a-zA-Z]{4,8}
Result: ZSSMBRA
Time: 0.0345
^^^
There's nothing reasonable about any software patent. Also, the terms they list on their licensing page are the terms for now; there's nothing that compels the patent holder to license any particular person or organization for any particular use of the patented ideas. The patent holder can deny you a patent license just because they want to.
/.ers in other threads) would look to other formats, lossless formats if their storage space was large enough, better lossy encoders otherwise. For years now, far more capable portable digital audio players play Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. If I were compressing human speech and I wanted to save a lot of space, I'd still use Speex over MP3.
Anyone who cares about sound quality ("Use the best tool for the job!", the unending cry of
Digital Citizen
i don't listen to on my computer. i listen to FLACs and SHNs. the only time i bother with mp3 is for my ipod shuffle.
useful platforms.
I was at university at the time and some of the warez groups started trading mp3's. We downloaded the files and couldn't believe the quality of the encoding and how small the file was.
;)
When I told one of my other friends about it, he said "bullshit, can't be done. You guys are lying". My response was to shrug my shoulders.. I didn't care if he believed me or not. Of course 3 months later he comes running up to me telling me about this new compression format called mp3..
And Chris, just in case you're reading this.. There's a reason you flunked compsci and switched to an english major
The CB App. What's your 20?
When Fraunhofer started using other technologies in their development, in 1987, how long did patents last? 17 years. Why would they have had any expectation of retaining their exclusivity on their MP3 patents any longer than that? Because they were motivated to invent, even with those terms of exclusivity. The later patent law term extensions played no part whatsoever in motivating them to invent, and publish their invention under protection. They received their US patent 11/26/96. So they'd have about 8 years left now to exploit it. That certainly seems generous, especially for software, which not only expires in interoperability quickly, but scales up in demand very quickly.
--
make install -not war
People might have noticed, but "Have a Habana" with your hosts Bill and Monica was on the tube at the time(or at least in post production), aannd...well, you know...where else are you going to get R rated material on broadcast TV?
What?
mp3 wasnt playable on my 50mhz 68030 amiga, mp2's only. on a p.c it was still a huge hog, on a p70-ish machine. no mmx back then, of course. this was a big problem if you wanted to listen to mp3's AND DO ANYTHING ELSE!
WMA supports multi-channel surround does it not?
If you're worried about loss you should go vinyl or at least SACD. On halfway decent headphones the difference is not that audible, but on a good system the difference is huge.
And since every new standard sans OGG tries to include the latest & greatest DRM, none of them will uncrown MP3 as long as players remain available.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Around the time that MP3 was getting on its feet, I remember tinkering with MP1 and MP2 files... Websites like the Internet Underground Music Archive had them available for download. The thing I remember was that MP1 files played fine on a 486 50 MHz, while high-bitrate MP2 files were too choppy to play back properly. MP3s were out of the question on a 486 (until many years later when highly optimized MP3 player software emerged). I remember that even 192 kbps MP2s still had numerous audible defects in them, so 128 kbps MP3s seemed amazing in comparison. Of course, I had to decode the MP3 file to WAV before playing it. Those were the days...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Back in the spring of 1997, my buddies and I ordered the entire Time-Life Sounds of the 70's collection and ripped the entire thing (@128kbps) using l3enc. I personally had a 486DX33 set up with a SB Pro soundcard with a panasonic CDROM interface and 4 2x Panasonic CDROMs. A batch file ripped and encoded up to 4 CDs in about 16 hours IIRC. We even tagged them all with ID3. Ahhh, those were the days...
I am so sick and tired of the folks at the Fraunhofer Institut. First they get funded by German tax payers, and then they sell their product - no, make that the tax payers' product - again through the MPEG licence mafia to the tax payers. And to make matters worse, public broadcasters avoid MPEG because of the licence.
My first was Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Give It Away."
It just had to be.
Lordy, I remember the days when I had to decode an mp3 before I burned the CD because the burning software didn't do it itself. I had a 333 MHz compy and Winamp, which apparently really kicks the llama's ass.
Frylock: "We should have cloned twenties, Jackson wouldn't have given a fuck."
Give it up for MP3! My first encounter with mp3 was february 1998 if I recall correct. It was during some small-time space expo. Some dudes brought their computers for demo's. One of them was playing songs with a quality that really overwhelmed all of us. Upon enquiring what devilish technology was capable of making such sound: we met mp3 and winamp!
the latest fedora core wont play mp3s out the box??
No it wasn't. With a bit of priority-managment, right from within Winamp, it was perfectly usable on my P60, even while Winamp used as much as 90% of the CPU. Just give the decoding-thread low prio, use large buffer (several seconds), and give the output-thread high prio. Simple as that.
Dear overlord,
No.
I was born here.
My whole family has served defending here.
Go back to Russia.
Sincerely,
Noone's slave
Citizen
[in reply to]
Dear Sir,
If you don't like it, leave.
Sincerely,
The Man
Director, U.S. Patent & Trademark Office
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
MP3 was critized when it came out for requiring too much processing to encode and decode. Thanks to the exponential growth in CPU power that problem quickly went away. I also remember being able to play 128 kbps MP3s on my computer but not higher bitrates. I had one that was 320 kbps and my computer's MP3 player would take 4x longer to play it stopping every second while trying to decode it.
http://www.vorbis.com/faq.psp
* Vorbis files can compress to a smaller file size and still sound fine
* Vorbis' better compression will cut down on bandwidth costs
* For a given file size, Vorbis sounds better than MP3.
* If you decide to sell your music in MP3 format, you are responsible for paying Fraunhofer a percentage of each sale because you are using their patents.
* Vorbis is patent and license-free, so you will never need to pay anyone in order to sell, give away, or stream your own music.
* Epic Games (the makers of Unreal Tournament, et. al.) have used Vorbis in their games ever since releasing Unreal Tournament 2003 to compress game music without having per-game license fees sap profits from every game sold.
* Vorbis saves developers money by avoiding patent-license fees.
* Ogg Vorbis has been designed to completely replace all proprietary, patented audio formats. That means that you can encode all your music or audio content in Vorbis and never look back.
Need I say more?
-Joe
Well, it's all largely subjective, but to me MP3 VBR at 128ish sounds like crap, while Vorbis (not Ogg, Ogg is the wrapper btw) at -q -1 (42ish kbps) sounds much more natural. Vorbis retains all the high frequencies so it sounds a bit better at less than half the bitrate, although I can tell the difference very easily. I can't tell the difference between CD and MP3 192 and CD and Vorbis 128 though. I don't have any great equipment though, just a Live! soundcard and 4.1 Philips speakers. For the record, I rip at Vorbis -q 6 and FLAC for rare/whatever CDs with EAC (www.exactaudiocopy.de).
By the way, you should try that compile someone did that allowed Vorbis to encode to -2 quality at 500 BITS per second. It sounded quite amazing, considering the size (well, it sounded like crap, but a whole CD took like 2 MB).
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Everyone should steal a song in celebration...
CD? No clue.
Who? No clue.
Apps? I'm gonna guess SoundEdit16 since you mention SWA in the subject line, although it could be the aforementioned l3enc.
My first experience with mp3 audio was while working at a broadcast facility in fall of 96. We had recently bought a few Telos Zephyrs to do remote broadcasting over dual-channel ISDN. Most of what was transmitted was voice, but when they put music on it was amazing how clean and full it sounded. Amazing little boxes, those zephyrs...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Well, considering MP3 didn't use to have a DRM inbuilt and was straight forward and a popular standard, i think that the new unpopular and DRM infested standard should use another extension.
Beta Sucks
Huh?? You have *millions* of audio files? My /home/dbruce/ogg folder has 6847 files and represents about 500 ripped CDs, all stored as max-quality oggs, and occupies 27.1 GB. Thus, it is taking up less than 17% of the disk I bought for $120 last year, or around $20 worth of storage. That works out to about $0.04 per CD, using the highest possible quality setting. However, I have two disks set up as raid, so you can double that.
Nonetheless, I don't think the file size of ogg is much of an expense.
if concerts were traded on vinyl or SACD i guess i would think about it. but since the story is about mp3, i will continue to talk about computer filetypes. that's why i listen to lossy on my shuffle, cuz i use headphones. but i listen to lossless on my "good system"
I remember meeting Karlheinz Brandenburg (Picture here - he's second from the right). Those guys over at Fraunhofer IIS really did something good.
He was the hard core engineer type; complete with powerful glasses, and greasy hair. He seemed tired of all the politicking. He was probably frustrated that so many people were using mp3 and Fraunhofer wasn't seeing a dime. Maybe he was frustrated by lack of credit; I'm not sure. That genie was out of the bottle, and it wasn't going back in.
Anyway, a younger, less tactful member of our group, who felt strongly about non-proprietary codecs was talking with Mr. Brandenburg, and, well - the guy just went ballistic. I remember the words "vy don't you start a company, and ve'll see how you do!" shouted loudly and with a good bit of spittle. Hee hee. I'll never forget that look. That young buck was like a deer in the headlights. I was really surprised that someone with that kind of fame (well, ok, nobody knows who this guy is. But co-inventor of mp3 gets you major geek points in my book) would lose his cool like that. Poor guy must've been under pressure.
The look on my colleague's face as he staggered back over to us was worth it, though.
I sent an email to IUMA suggesting that they start providing .mp3 files instead of .mp2.
:(
They weren't too interested at the time, I don't think.
Good to know they're still around. I remember getting some good tracks from there.
they have a US tech patent, which will probably expire in 2100
I sincerely hope that was sarcasm. U.S. software patents expire 20 years after the date of filing, just like every other invention patent.
The rest of the songs are from ripped CDs. As you say, iTunes rips to some weird format by default. But I think a good portion of users use other ripping methods, or just download mp3s.
There are a number of patents under the mp3 licensing group http://www.mp3licensing.com/patents/index.html. Some look like they might expire soon, I'd welcome corrections if I am wrong.
The essential MP3 patent is listed on that page as "internal no. P3912605", which corresponds to US Patent 5,579,430. That one was filed in April 1990 and should expire in April 2010.
I mean, MP3 is great and all... but when will it support ogg-vobis?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
...yep the RIAA got it...poor bugger. Meanwhile it's parents have been sued and have declared themselves bankrupt. In an official statement RIAA a spokesperson said "Being 10 years old doesn't mean you're exempt from the law".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Fraunhofer has patents on psychoacoustic compression. OGG does psychoacoustic compression.
The patents aren't as broad as you think, and the Ogg Vorbis developers have done a good job of inventing a codec that the patent claims do not describe:
Speaking of mp3s, a band with music in the 2005 release of War of the Worlds has their song available for download. A small portion of the song is in the movie, when the Tom Cruises kid is walking out of the truck with his headphones on toward the beginning of the movie. Pretty cool for the band to offer it from their site for free. Just a small example of the sweetness of MP3.
You can get the song here. This is direct from the bands site, so I bet its legit.
http://www.capstonemusic.net
Rock on MP3!
BTW, forgot to mention that I actually know one guy that was involved in the MP3 development (Jürgen Koller). Haven't met him for several years however, but he seems to still work at that place ... here you can find a picture of him and an address where to send the beer ;)
CD : Exit Planet Dust by the Chemical Brothers. I had to encode them at a rate of 98 since all I had to store them on was a 100 Meg drive. Ya. Meg. It was like 200 bucks back them.
:]
Who demoed it : For a short time, Apple's Phil Schiller worked at Macromedia. He was the guy. Took it to some meeting, was super cool.
And the apps: Bingo! You got 50% of it. Back then when we were working on Shockwave Audio, SWA really was MP3 - but even we didn't know it. To the best of my knowledge, Macromedia was the first major licensee of Fraunhoffer's technology and it was used in Director, Shockwave and SoundEdit 16. The Audio was recorded and compressed with SoundEdit 16. The player was created in Director and was cross platform from the get go.
I mentioned this to our VP, Norm and he instantly thought of issues with the MPAA so nothing became of my creation. Too bad we were a few years ahead of our time. Others, like Buzz Kettles on the SoundEdit team created simple players as well. I'm pretty sure mine was the first to create a playlist and allow songs to be selected from a list. A few months ago at a bar in San Francisco, a guy came in, recognized me and said "Zav! Hey, Do you remember when we wrote the first mp3 player ever?" Man, I had totally forgotten about it. And in case anyone cares, my name is Alex Zavatone.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
While Ogg is technically superior, it's never going to catch on because:
As a geek, I'd love the see technical superiority win, but I don't think Ogg is well-positioned to have any chance of taking marketshare from MP3s.
Who cares about the 10th anniversary of a mediocre file format; just think: somewhere out there is a person who wakes up each morning and thinks to himself, "I wonder what news I'll find on the Data Compression News Blog today?"
Guess I'm not as much of a geek as I thought...
Since you seem to know so much about audio codecs, perhaps you can enlighten me whether the following rumour has some truth in it:
Do high-bitrate MP3s (eg. 256kbit) provide a better sound replication compared to OGG files of same bitrate?
Everybody seems to agree that OGG sounds much better for a given bitrate <=160kbit. However I've seen a couple of articles that suggest that MP3 is at least competitive if not better when encoding at higher bitrates.
Was anybody else here using HotlineSW in '97 to download MP3s? We were hosting a major Hotline Server on University computers.
how is this troll?
This is not the greatest
It seems to me that since storage capacities are rising while cost to the end user is falling (i.e. a 200gb drive can be purchased for around US$80) will compression even matter in another 10 years? Right now the "pirates" are starting to distribute in both AAC & APE formats (totally lossless compression) files are only marginally smaller than the standard 10mb/minute for 16-bit .wav files. I've ripped nearly ALL of my own CD's (roughly 300 CD's, at 320kbps VBR and it's only 21 Gigs of space... so what, like 4-5 DVD-9's?
I'm told MP2 is better at higher bitrates than MP3 is. That the extra layer 3 stuff doesn't help at higher bitrates and actually hurts.
True? I dunno.
As to the comments about OGG avoiding the MP3 patents, I have a couple things.
First, at a very low level, all MP3s are VBR. It uses a "bit reservoir", and how you deplete the bit reservoir can be optimized by multi-pass recording. VBR does not preclude multi-pass encoding, nor does it even help you maintain a noise floor level any differently than multi-pass with a bit reservoir does.
The 2nd point sounds interesting to me, it does seem like it avoids that aspect of the Fraunhofer patent.
But in the end, I can't go into this in detail, but Fraunhofer seems to think their patents cover OGG, and when you're trying to get an mp3 license, this is an issue. Are they correct? Are they using illegal means? I'm not sure it matters, it definitely puts the chill on commercial OGG support.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
MP3 got a nice clang to the name. :)
Personally I lik the Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) file format, its great. Much better compression and quality than mp3.
I see that some games have started using it too, games can do that because they include their own decoder in the game. But for people to use other formats its difficult because mp3 is pretty much "the standard".
But mp3 is patended, I prefer Ogg Vorbis since its free, royalty-free, patent-free, public domain specification.
Who can change something is the warez groups, if they decide to rip and encode in other formats when they release music.
the official birthday for mp3 is july 14th, 1995, at 12:29: gmt+2.m p3/index_d.html
.mp3 .mp3. In other words, we should watch upcoming WWW-pages, shareware, demos etc., for them not to use .bit-extensions. There is a reason, believe me :-)
at this time the fraunhofer institute for integrated circuits released the following (internal) email:
http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/pub_rel/presse/2005/
translation:
Subject: Filename extensions for Layer3:
Hello,
according to a huge ammount of opinions in our poll: The extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3 is
Juergen Zeller
Bah. Kids today have it easy. Back in the day all you could get your hands on was an Adlib that played .ROL FM files. Before that PCs actually came with this internal speaker that was used for sound. When I say "sound", I don't mean a beep here and there upon bootup. So the Adlib was an enormous improvement even without digitized music.
.MOD files became reality. Nothing quite like playing a 44.1khz .MOD file on a 4.77mhz XT. Of course, at the time .MOD was the only format practical for playing song-length (or album-length even) music.
.FLI and a handful of others that were only useful for playing around with.
Then came SoundBlaster 8-bit and
Today even video is taken for granted with DivX and friends. Years ago all we had was
What is scary is that content itself is now taken for granted. The internet and today's tech make things just too easy. I know people who must constantly have a new album playing. They will rarely listen to music past a week or two and discard it like a consumable item, but I digress.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
There used to be a utility from Microsoft for Windows 3.1 that allowed the internal PC speaker play wav files and other such sounds. Handy if you didnt have speakers or a soundcard. Quality was obviously rubbish, but better than nothing...
The first one I ripped, using l3enc, I wanted to be a short track to take less time.
I ripped "What's That Noise?" by S.O.D.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
That's what I meant with the more than a beep comment. Few people probably realize or remember what the internal speaker can do.
Way before Win 3.x and widespread SB cards DOS games did just that. Though it wasn't of much use for anything else because it's kinda hard to get digitized sound with no input. Even the games used it sparingly because of the massive space requirements and costs of actually aquiring and manipulating digitized sound. Still, an Adlib had a much better sound that really made games come alive. The difference was like that of games before 3d cards and those after. A world of difference.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
It was way before MP3...
I remembers listening an Axel F MOD in some DOS teal background player whose name I've shamely forgotten.
And it was amazing... seeing all those spectrum analyzers dancing on the screen following the pretty cool synthesized music.
So, my first experience with mp3 wasn't exactly pleasing.... you see, when I listedend to my first mp3 (I think it was Madonna - You'll see, at 32 Kbps) in my SBPRO, I was screaming inside: I WANT MY MODS!!!.
--
I feel nostalgia for what I can't remember...
speak.exe was the file. it was a replacement pcspeaker driver. aside from the quality issue there was a problem with the way it operated. the pc speaker was originally designed (and still is) to use an interrupt to operate and as a result everything halts when the speaker is used. normal short beeps aren't a problem but playing a waveform for a few seconds or minutes causes problems.
so it was sort of a pain if you used it with all of windows sound effects turned on as it would halt your mouse movement and everything else until the sound was through playing...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
rotfl: fhg employee here...
;-) it is a german company, not an american one... plus, we make enough money already with mp3 already, we don't have to sue anyone.
we are on the good side of the force
but actually thompson is the company which gives out the licenses. iis just gets a percentage.