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.

Re:I've been wondering...

[cyclop]

Yes, but FreeBSD girls rule! [prague.tv].

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.

dupe :-) (with link)

[dabadab]

dupe [slashdot.org]

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 [wikipedia.org] :).

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

[Spacezilla]

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