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'MP3' Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary

Posted by timothy on from the instant-nostalgia dept.

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."

3 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Re:ogg by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    No, Ogg Vorbis is not stylish, hip or in, it can only be played on good digital music players.

  2. Double taxation by msbsod · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.

  3. OGG isn't free as in speech. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Fraunhofer has patents on psychoacoustic compression. OGG does psychoacoustic compression.

    How the OGG knuckleheads overlook this I don't know?

    The OGG people I guess think that as long as you write it on your own it must be unencumbered. Wrong.

    OGG does sound better than MP3 for a given file size, but so do WMA, AAC and MP3 Pro.

    Honestly, since it fails its primary task (to be unencumbered), I don't have much use for it, regardless of performance. I just use MP3 instead since it is universal.