The Fraunhofer Institut had been working on its lossy audio compression tech for phone line transmission since 1977.

On this day in 1996, a freshly inked U.S. patent quietly laid the cornerstone of the digital music revolution. In addition to facilitating this now vast internet-based entertainment business, the humble MP3 file format would propel broadband proliferation, usher in the iPod era, and arguably precipitate the iPhone and all the other touchscreen-slabs that remain indispensable gadgets to this day.

MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) files were devised by scientists to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent an audio file. Key personnel behind the invention of MP3 included: Bernhard Grill, Karlheinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, Ernst Eberlein, and Dieter Seitzer. Brandenburg is often credited as being the father of MP3, for leading this and similar research since 1977, but Seitzer (for example) brought expertise in transferring music over standard phone lines.

  • B-TR3E@feddit.org
    0·
    7 days ago

    Utter bullshit. What does the registration of a US patent have to do with anything? MP3 became part of the (international) MPEG standard in 1992, it was first introduced in 1991 and developed by the Fraunhofer Institut in Germany. The iśsuing date of the US patent is just some buraeucratic detail, it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual development and availability of the standard or the algorithm.

    • TachyonTele@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      Key personnel behind the invention of MP3 included: Bernhard Grill, Karlheinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, Ernst Eberlein, and Dieter Seitzer. Brandenburg is often credited as being the father of MP3, for leading this and similar research since 1977

    • lauha@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 days ago

      Well, flac is hardly superior.

      The files are HUGE and there is way less support for flac. The flac is inferior in a sense that the “revolution” would have never happened with flac.

      Then again, the whole comparison itself is dumb because it’s apples to oranges comparison, because mp3 is a older lossy codec and flac is newer lossless codec.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        0·
        7 days ago

        Way less support? Maybe a decade ago. Today it’s pretty well supported in my experience. Hell, even my OEM car head unit supports flac on a USB stick.