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.

Comments

I perfer the version

[Timesprout]

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.

More cutting-edge innovation?

[terrencefw]

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?

Re:More cutting-edge innovation?

[dam.capsule.org]

I think that last.fm use the data from other users to determine what music you might like. In the same way amazon suggestion system uses.

The guy here seems to work on a system which would analyze the music itself (tempo, melody, ...) to find other matching tunes.

At least that's how I see it.

Re:More cutting-edge innovation?

[mstra]

Ah, so Pandora, then?

Re:More cutting-edge innovation?

[gEvil (beta)]

Nope. Pandora doesn't automatically analyze music. IIRC, they have a whole bunch of people who have studied music extensively who sit down and listen to a bunch of music. They then categorize each track/band by a whole ton of esoteric qualities that most people wouldn't be able to pick out--tempo/cadence, key, chord progressions, orchestration, types of harmonies, etc etc etc. It's these combinations of things that we generally are attracted to in music.

There. Fixed that.

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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^W^W^W send cease and desist letters.

Royalties?

[grolschie]

Even folk-rock singer Suzanne Vega inadvertently played a walk-on role in the creation of MP3. "I know on whose shoulders I stand and who else contributed a lot," says Brandenburg, now director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany.

Words are cheap. Maybe the MP3 patent holders should share the royalties? :-)

Picture of this guy

[FredDC]

I bet a lot of record company executives have a picture of this guy hanging in their office! On top of a darts board...

Re:I've been wondering...

[cyclop]

Yes, but FreeBSD girls rule!.

Re:if wasn't this format, it would have been anoth

[cyclop]

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.?

extended and changed

[Bizzeh]

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.

Re:if wasn't this format, it would have been anoth

[Random Destruction]

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.

Re:if wasn't this format, it would have been anoth

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

When patents expire

[owlman17]

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?

Re:When patents expire

[ajs318]

They were never valid anyway in the EU or the UK, since MP3 encoding is a mathematical operation and beyond the scope of patentability in those jurisdictions.

Re:if wasn't this format, it would have been anoth

[Hognoxious]

Also with the way p2p mp3s are, if flac became popular, people would just transcode their 128kbps mp3s to flac.

Coool. That would recover the lost quality, then?

Fraunhofer: The people who made piracy possible

[BillGatesLoveChild]

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:

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/securi ty/story/0,10801,108506,00.html
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-04 022006/

Does this mean Fraunhofer's merry band of teutonic scientists can be both co-defendants and expert-witnesses in your case?

Re:Fraunhofer: The people who made piracy possible

[Bearhouse]

Good link. For those who don't know.. An 'ipfilter.dat' file can block IPs from certain companies and agencies you may not want spying on you. And here's how to install it manually. 1)Rename a blank .txt file to-> ipfilter.dat 2)Download an IP Filter List off a security website ( see parent ) and copy its contents into your ipfilter.dat. You may have to Right Click->Open With->Notepad . 3)Copy it to "C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\uTorrent\" . 4)In uTorrent Options->Preferences->Advanced. Change ipfilter.enable to true . 5)Restart uTorrent

Re:if wasn't this format, it would have been anoth

[Yoozer]

Really short explanation: FLAC is like Winzip for .wav files.

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 .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).

As usual, Wikipedia has a page on the subject :).

Re:Uh...

[o'reor]

Hi, I've been working for a few months myself on the subject of audio codecs, at Orange (France Telecom) R&D department, and I can confirm that Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" is a popular tune to test new codecs on (alongside with a tune from "The Cranberries" first album).

You can judge your codec on the overall quality of sound (distortion), the rendering of consonants, the residual noise in silences between two uttered words, etc. Of course, various other kinds of samples were used too (orchestral music, plain speech, male/female voices, and so on).

Developing codecs was fun, but I got tired of it after a while, and I went back to developing Linux programs on embedded systems in another company...

Re:if wasn't this format, it would have been anoth

[sherpajohn]

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.

Tom's Diner: It was a fan

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Tom's Diner: It was a fan

[steveha]

Okay, I just asked an expert in the field, and he told me that the issue with that song is that the mix makes little errors sound louder. I apologize, but I wasn't able to follow the technical details enough to explain them here.

I specifically asked about this fan story and he said "No, that's not it."

Now that I think about it, this explanation is patently silly. The whole job of a perceptual audio codec is to throw away anything that human ears cannot hear; if inaudible fan noise is being preferentially encoded, that's a horrible bug in a perceptual coder.

steveha

Re:if wasn't this format, it would have been anoth

[Spacezilla]

No! It doesn't beg the question! It RAISES the question!

Overrated...

[evilviper]

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.

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 .mp3 and any MP3 player in the world will handle it.

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).

German Law?

[JimDaGeek]

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.)

What law is that? Do we have anything like that in the USA? Man, that sounds like a great law. Usually the researchers/scientists do all the real work and then the corporate execs get all the big salaries.