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.

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?

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? :-)

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.

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?

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 [computerworld.com]
http://p2pnet.net/index.php?page=reply&story=878 [p2pnet.net]

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/ [greatinca.net]

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

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: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: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.

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.

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.

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