Happy Birthday MP3
The MP3 is celebrating its tenth birthday today. On July 14, 1995, the abbreviation.mp3 prevailed as the file name for the audio compression format in an internal survey at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen. Until then, the process developed primarily in Erlangen was known as ISO Standard IS 11172-3 "MPEG Audio Layer 3".
Today, MP3 is the worldwide standard file format for playing and distributing music and other audio files on the Internet and computers. The MP3 gained popularity primarily through its use in digital music exchanges. In addition, according to information from the Fraunhofer Society, over three million mobile MP3 players were sold in Germany alone last year.
MP3 allows digital acoustic information, such as that found on a CD, to be stored in a space-saving manner, thus enabling it to be transmitted quickly. However, information is lost during compression. The trick is to remove sounds that humans can barely hear. These include very high and very low frequencies as well as soft tones that immediately follow a loud tone. Other algorithms match pitches when their frequency differences are smaller than what the human ear can usually just resolve. The MP3 obtained at the end of the compression process then delivers audio signals that are identical to those of the original audio file to the ears of the vast majority of users.
