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How MP3 Was Born
Actual Reality points us to an interview in BusinessWeek.com with the man most often cited as the inventor of the MP3 format — though Karlheinz Brandenburg credits many for the development, including in particular Suzanne Vega.
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where MP2 was recording in studio, gets wasted and gets it on with Suzanne Vega across the mixing deck leading to a bouncing bundle of MP3. It's much more rock and roll.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
neo
From TFA:
As director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, Brandenburg continues to be involved in the cutting edge of digital music. Researchers under his supervision are working on technology that would, for example, analyze a user's tastes based on music he or she has already downloaded, search the Internet for other tunes in the same genre, and automatically assemble a playlist. Brandenburg is also involved in research to deliver more realistic, true-to-life media than anything now available. Perhaps he'll even help touch off another revolution.
Er, nothing like audioscrobbler/last.fm then?
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I bet a lot of record company executives have a picture of this guy hanging in their office! On top of a darts board...
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
I'm sure other compression formats exist or would have existed. With the advent of the Internet, it was inevitible that the record companies would be where they are today.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Yes, but FreeBSD girls rule!.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
To say a single individual invented the MP3 format is rediculous
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
I always thought that with the advent of broadband and cheap 10^2-gigabyte storage, FLAC would have overtook mp3, however it is not happened still. Probably by "fault" of portable players, where storage space is still critical. Are there any statistics on the average usage/trends of MP3 vs FLAC/Ogg Vorbis/wma/aac etc.?
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
the mp3 format has been extended and changed so much, and had stuff added and removed (vbr, abr, and tagging.... tagging shouldnt have even been there, since mp3 is a datastream not a container), over time. its hardly the same format now.
portfolio
Indeed, other compressed formats would have, and have, come about.
But as mp3 was the first to rule the net what is the added value of your observation?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30743
20th century Marxism is not progress...
This is the second time I've heard of FLAC and I still don't know what it is and how it differ's from MP3. MP3 did well because it was small and one of the first on the seen that almost everything seemed to support. Its the interoperability, size and quality that are important. I can't hear the difference between a 192kbs MP3 and a audio CD most people can't, using earphones I can't hear a difference between 128kbs and a audio CD (I've found this to be fifty/fifty) and there is your problem. Early on you could get a lot of tracks on an MP3 player with 'good enough' quality and with 2gb,20gb MP3 players being around most people are tempted to encode them to 192kbs and they still got hundreds of songs on their device. FLAC, Ogg and WMA may offer substantial benifits (I know WMA offers a higher rate of compression for the same quality) but many MP3 players don't support those formats, so why bother storing your music in them?
Its much more likely that people can't tell the difference. Most people think 128kbps mp3 is 'cd quality'. For those of us who know that that's a crock, there's V2 and V0, or even 320cbr. Almost nobody can tell the difference between 320 and flac. So why should people who want to download the latest slammin RnB hit want anything else?
Also with the way p2p mp3s are, if flac became popular, people would just transcode their 128kbps mp3s to flac.
:x
FLAC is losslessly compressed, mp3 is lossily compressed. You can get down to about 50% of the original filesize with FLAC; with mp3 the limits are whatever you'll tolerate down to something ridiculously crappy (16kbps or something I think is the minimum?).
So FLAC is for when you care about quality over file size. It also isn't nearly as supported as mp3.
The Fraunhofer patents expire April 2010, at which time MP3 algorithms become public domain. What will this mean? Cheaper players? Will mp3 be as free like ogg vorbis by then?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
dupe
Real life is overrated.
dupe
Real life is overrated.
What isn't mentioned in Herr Brandenburg's interview is that Fraunhofer have been playing both sides. If you've bought an MP3 capable player, you've paid Fraunhofer royalties. But Fraunhofer have been playing both sides: developing tools to track MP3s using watermarks so record companies crack down on piracy:
i ty/story/0,10801,108506,00.html
4 022006/
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/secur
http://p2pnet.net/index.php?page=reply&story=878
They've been expanding their IP business too: Next time you run BitTorrent or eMule (they do both), run it with a network tracker. You'll see computers from Fraunhofer affiliates all over the world taking a peek at what you're downloading.
http://greatinca.net/blog/emule-ip-blocker-hits-0
Does this mean Fraunhofer's merry band of teutonic scientists can be both co-defendants and expert-witnesses in your case?
The point was that the record industry can be upset with this individual for creating mp3 (not saying they are upset, just hypothetically), but that the end result was inevitible.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
at least we get out to events where we can meet a real life hero in Torvalds, unlike you who hide away in a little room, masturbating over how cool you are posting troll comments on /.
Really short explanation: FLAC is like Winzip for .wav files.
.wav demands. This way, you still have the originals - well, at least more "original" if the CD is scratched or stolen or destroyed. It's not even an esoteric audiophile reason; it's just that it works well for archiving (which in turn begs the question why you want to archive something on a portable player that faces risk every day, but hey).
:).
Longer explanation: Why you want to do this? You want the originals on your harddisk without bothering about ISO files which you'd have to mount first using Daemon Tools or something (which means you can't play 'm back directly). You don't want the completely ludicrous space requirements
As usual, Wikipedia has a page on the subject
The changes are inconsequential fluff and do not represent any inventive step themselves.
Patents are awarded for inventions, tweaking the format of a file might make it incompatible but it isn't enough to get around a patent. You would have to invent a new way to compress to do that.
played 1000 times and still no messages from satan - sigh - i miss bible bashers.
Oh please, who downgraded me as troll? Cannot we joke here?
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Presumably then, MP3 technology is going to net Fraunhofer over $1 billion over its lifetime.
Does this strike anyone else as kind of ridiculous? I mean, it's nice that cool inventions are rewarded. But $1 billion for one invention? I feel like this is the flipside of how patent law skews things in computer science. The other side being the cases where a tiny company is sued out of existence for using a linked list.
Almost nobody can tell the difference between 320 and flac. So why should people who want to download the latest slammin RnB hit want anything else?
Right *slap on my head* this answers my first question pretty easily. Anyway I still can't find, just for curiosity, a stat on the usage of various music file formats (I guess doing stats on files shared on SoulSeek would be a good indicator). If anyone knows of one, I'd like to see it.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Hmm, somehow I have a feeling that that cute red daemon would realy be happier on somebody else's T-shirt...
Interoperability is a problem for FLAC (most hardware players don't support it), but it shouldn't be because FLAC is free and open. I wish DVD players/changers would play FLAC files the same way current CD players play mp3 files. Using FLAC, I can probabably fit every Led Zeppelin studio album on one single-layer DVD±R. I wouldn't need no stinkin' mega CD changer.
The importance of size is changing, which I think is the GP's point ("the advent of broadband and cheap 10^2-gigabyte storage"). FLAC is around 700-800 kbps and this is small enough for archiving and transferring today. Small-storage portable players can still benefit from smaller files, but with today's fast CPU's, FLAC files can be quickly transcoded (without "ripping") to MP3/AAC/Vorbis when needed.
As you know by now, the audio quality of FLAC is the same as the source (lossless). Transcoding from FLAC to MP3 will give you the same quality as ripping from CD to MP3, but much faster. Transcoding an iTunes Store AAC to MP3 will give you crappy audio quality.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
man most often cited as the inventor of.. I'm not familiar with the whos and who of mp3, but it was under my impression it was patented hense all these threats of lawsuits. So who really made it first? The patent holder or if different this guy.
Should be informative, not funny, because sadly people think you can just make lost information reappear. I had somebody tell me that they could fit an entire HD movie, compressed losslessly, on a CD-R.
I rip all my cd's into iTunes as wav - I want the original. One issue with that though is there's no meta-data, another I just discovered when I bought an iPod - 8gb is about 12 albums, no where near enough for our one week vacation! So now I had to make AAC copies of every wav file in my collection (that only took 8 hours or so), create playlists using only the AAC files and put them on my iPod. Fun Wow! well, its gonna be really nice for that 3 hour wait in the airport on the way to Mexico.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
I wonder if it paid off to mention Suzanne in that interview...?
I remember (back before TechTV got bought out and became crap) that Suzanne Vega was on The ScreenSavers and talking to Leo Laporte about this very topic. If I remember correctly, she was actually very unhappy about the whole MP3 idea, especially since it was her music that they used to help fine tune the codec. It surprises me a bit that the article states that Karlheinz met her at the MP3 commemoration event.
*slight crashing sound*
'' I always thought that with the advent of broadband and cheap 10^2-gigabyte storage, FLAC would have overtook mp3, ''
The iPod doesn't support FLAC.
(It does support Apple Lossless, but player energy consumption is proportional to megabytes of music read, so you really don't want any lossless encoding on your iPod).
there are several that do, check out http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
IIRC, the issue is a fan that was runnning "silently" in the studio where Vega recorded the song. Of course, "silence" for human ears is not silence for a perceputal audio codec. The result was that the codec was throwing critical bits away trying to encode this fan noise that nobody should have been able to hear, and the rest of the song came out terribly distorted.
Or at least, that's the story I heard from one of the MP3 and AAC inventors.
At the very least use Apple Lossless. It's like FLAC, but Apple-supported. It supports tags, artwork, and takes half the space.
And no, you're not losing anything. That's why "Lossless" is part of the name.
± 29 dB
Karlheinz Brandenburg did much of his work on MP3 as a postdoc working under JJ Johnston at Bell Labs. JJ Johnston had done pioneering work on the psychoacoustic aspects of audio encoding, including a codec called PAC (Perceptual Audio Codec). Do a patent search for audio patents under the name "James D. Johnston".
s /2006FlanaganSpeechAudioProcessingAward.html
s -researcher-played-role/story.aspx?guid=%7B6D73DA9 E-AA07-4A2B-9D2B-25C7815974A3%7D&dist=MostReadHome
JJ Johnston later went on to help develop AAC. These days, JJ Johnston works at Microsoft, developing audio technology.
In 2006 the IEEE awarded the James L. Flanagan Speech & Audio Processing Award to JJ Johnston.
http://home.comcast.net/~retired_old_jj/
http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/awards/bio
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/ex-bell-lab
No! It doesn't beg the question! It RAISES the question!
MP3 is simply overrated. Today, with all the vast improvements to MP3 sound quality that have been made by LAME, such as VBR and psycho acoustic models, it's still less than a 33% bitrate reduction over MP2.
.mp3 and any MP3 player in the world will handle it.
At the time (mid to late '90s) when it was still CBR, and sounded pretty lowsy. It was barely any improvement at all over the MP2 files that were popular around the web. What's worse, MP3 used significantly more CPU power to accomplish that small bitrate savings.
It seems those who forget history are doomed to repeat it... It's a whole new level of sad to find people talking encoding their music to high-bitrate MP3s for better sound quality... It's been pretty universally accepted for a very long time that, at 192K or above, MP2 sounds far better than MP3 can ever hope to, at any bitrate. The frequency domain coding required by MP3 causes distortions that the time domain coding of MP2 does not. This (plus better error resiliency) is why broadcasters use MP2, and won't touch MP3.
And nobody better try to tell me they need MP3s for compatibility... MP3 is 100% backwards compatible... Rename your MP2 files to
While I'm ranting... the same goes for MPEG video. MPEG-1 looks better than MPEG-2 videos at low bitrates, and even better than MPEG-4 (IMO) at very low bitrates. Any format that can play MPEG-4 can play MPEG-2, and anything that can play MPEG-2 can play MPEG-1 (which happens to be patent-free for years now).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Thank you!
Once upon a time, mp3 was 1/10th to 1/5th the size of the original PCM audio off the CD. At this time, the benefits of the space savings were huge, while the loss in quality was negligible. My entire CD collection of roughly 200 CDs, is roughly 100GB as PCM, strait ripped off the CD. When a 14GB hard drive was considered huge, yeah, I was happier to have my audio as 128Kbps mp3 files.
Now things have changed. The sizes of new hard drives are more than I know how to fill up. (Others know how though... ) So now I can ask myself... I have 500GB of free space. Would I rather use up 50GB (FLAC seems to be roughly 50% the size of the original on average) of that space and have files that are identical to the original CD? Or save another 40GB at some loss? Both are marginal differences, but I would say that the cost of the extra 40GB on my drive being used is less of a concern for me than having compressed audio. I mean, the whole point of the big drive is to store stuff, not to be as unused as possible. With these "original" FLACs, you can do neat things.
Lets say FLAC is improved, or FLAC2 comes out. I could convert my entire library from one to the other, lossless to lossless, but pick up any new features or better compression. Once you have your ogg/mp3/aac, you should really stick with it, and not reencode to something else. I could set up a media player to transcode to mp3 on the fly when I need, and as mp3 itself improves, I can always have the best of the best there.
Now, it fits my needs because the only music I have are from CDs that I buy, and I don't use a media player. I can stow my CD collection away and not have to deal with it, or worry about having to rerip it one day into the latest. I've done it twice, first with 100 or so CDs (into some VBR 160 format ages ago, slowly upping that bitrate as time went on), and after setting up this 500GB monstrocity, did it again with 200 CDs or so to FLAC. It isn't fun and so long as I am a good backer upper, never again. If you must have a media player that plays FLAC, they exist, or there exists an alt firmware to your player to do it. Recoding on the fly isn't too bad I hear, but certainly slows it down. Either way, 500GB on a media player is inevitable, so lossy audio has little purpose going into the future. Even bandwidth wise, FLAC seems to stream fine over a LAN, and I don't use it beyond that.
For other uses, including music piracy, or streaming across low bandwidth links, or non-music purposes, mp3 will always have its uses, but they are shrinking.
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Also, this is amazing: Brandenburg hasn't become a dot-com zillionaire from his work on MP3, but he received a substantial cut of the royalty payments under a German law that entitles researchers to a share of the profits from their inventions. (He won't say how much.) America should be more like germany. Heil Hitler!Don't you mean audiogalaxy?
Sure, 30% savings over mp2 doesn't seem like much today when the difference is what? 5 seconds of downloading time. But way back when I downloaded my first mp3, I would have been using my trusty 14.4K USR Sportster.
Anyway, at modem speeds, 30% is like 5 minutes!
4 funny + 1 overrated = mod on crack.