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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."
I remember in 1996 I had a Metallica site (Yes, Metallica) with MP3s. They were small, encoded at 56k / 22khz mono, maybe about 1~1.5MB per song. I had people download hard to find B-sides. At that time is when I found out what bandwidth was. I had them served on my free 20MB web space at enteract.com. I had over 10,000 visitors in 4 months. They shut me down because I had to purchase more bandwidth. I thought it was free web space...
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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
That is certainly well within the capabilities of a modem to download. I recall downloading the SLS Linux distribution at about 30 1.4 MB floppy images, and I think I only had a 9600 bps modem. It took a while, but I got it.
Solid type storage formats? I'm not sure what you mean by that.10 years or so ago, I had a DAT drive at home, and one at work. So I used that to move stuff back and forth. It was expensive, but it held 2 GB on a single tape, far more than I'd ever need to move at once, and it was way better than trying to use floppies.
Ogg may be #1 in quality, but I seriously doubt they're #2 in popularity...
Here's my estimate of the popularity of these formats. AAC is quite high based solely on the number of songs sold by iTunes.
1) MP3
2) AAC
3) WMA
4) Ogg?
5) Others
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
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
http://www.real.com/ apparently has MP3 license for their Linux player. I remember reading a notice from them about that when RealPlayer 10 was first released.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
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
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:
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...
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
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