Happy 10th Birthday to MP3!

Lasse Penttinen
13 Jul 2005 8:58

Today we celebrate the invention of the so common audio format MP3 which already celebrates it's 10th birthday. As most of you probaply know, the file extension '.mp3' actually stands for files encoded to MPEG-1 Layer III standard format. The compression technology applied scientific advances of various fields: mathematics, psychology, acoustics, human anatomy, etc.
The researchers of Fraunhofer IIS did a bang-up job. Not only that they totally changed the business environment of the music industry, but the MP3 format has proven very well lasting and can still provide high quality compressed audio for years to come. Open sourced LAME MP3 Encoderis tweaked for maximum audio quality, and is very well able to challenge the newer audio formats such as the AAC.
The extension itself was decided by an internal poll at the Fraunhofer research center.

Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 12:29:49 +0200
Subject: Layer3 file extension: .mp3
Hi all,
this is the overwhelming result of our poll: everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3! As a consequence, everyone please mind that for WWW pages, shareware, demos, and so on, the .bit extension is not to be used anymore. There is a reason for that, believe me :-)
Juergen Zeller
Source: eCoustics

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