Who invented MP3s?

The MP3 format was given its name in 1995, but its development began years before. MP3's roots were in lots of earlier digital encoding research, perhaps most notably the doctoral work of Karlheinz Brandenburg, who is often cited as the format's inventor. He, however, would be the first to tell you that he didn't do it alone.

In the early 1980s, Brandenburg studied electrical engineering and mathematics at Erlangen University, and pursued his doctorate at Friedrich-Alexander University. Erlangen-Nuremberg. Professor Dieter Seitzer encouraged Brandenburg and other students to work on methods for transmitting music files over integrated services digital network (ISDN) telecommunication lines. Brandenburg studied psychoacoustics and was able to come up with a highly efficient audio compression algorithm that he called optimum coding in the frequency domain (OCF).

Brandenburg became an assistant professor and continued his research. He worked with scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (a member of a collection of 56 German research institutes called the Fraunhofer Society), which had a working relationship with Erlangen-Nuremberg University. At Fraunhofer, OCF was improved by the team with some contributions from researchers at Hannover University, AT&T Bell Labs and Thomson, and the adaptive spectral perceptual entropy coding (ASPEC) codec was born.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, MPEG took proposals from various groups that hoped for their encoding methods to be adopted. MPEG chose multiple proposals that were merged into three formats: MPEG-1 Audio Layer I, Layer II and Layer III. MPEG-1 Audio Layer III was largely based on ASPEC.

Other key engineers who worked on the project at Fraunhofer were Ernst Eberlein, Professor Heinz Gerhäuser, Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp, along with additional supporting staff. Together, they developed the software and hardware necessary for MP3 encoding and decoding. In 1993, Brandenburg officially joined the staff of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits as head of their Audio/Multimedia department.

In 2000, Brandenburg, Popp and Grill accepted the Deutscher Zukunftspreis award (or "German Future Prize") on behalf of the entire team for invention of the MP3. And in 2007, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) inducted Brandenburg, Seitzer and Gerhäuser into the CE Hall of fame for their contributions to the format. As of this writing, the main researchers all still work at Fraunhofer in various capacities, including Brandenburg, who is director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany. Brandenburg and others have even received a share of the profits from MP3 licensing, as dictated by German law.

Every innovation relies on prior breakthroughs, so related work that occurred before MP3 was even a thought should not be ignored. For instance, the Haas Effect was named after Helmut Haas, who presented the idea in his doctoral thesis in 1949. That same year, Claude Shannon and Robert Fanning came up with the predecessor to Huffman coding. David Huffman was a student of Fano, and he improved upon their technique in 1952. The MP3 researchers built upon the foundational work of many others, as well.

Suzanne Vega even played a small role, as Brandenburg and the team labored to compress the a cappella version of her song "Tom's Diner" without generating distortion and background noise. A portion of the song was used as test audio to determine when the quality had reached an acceptable level.

MP3 has had some far-reaching effects that few could have predicted. In 1997, the MP3-playing computer software Winamp became available. Allowing users to easily organize their music files and create playlists, Winamp was a harbinger of players to come. That same year, Microsoft's Windows Media Player began to support MP3 playback. Expensive portable MP3 players, like Diamond Multimedia's Rio 100 and Saehan Information System's MPMAN, also appeared in the late 1990s. They could hold a limited number of songs via flash memory, but those made way for hard drive memory players with higher storage capacity, like the original iPod, introduced in 2001, which played MP3s, AIFF and WAV formats. Newer iPods play advanced audio coding (AAC) natively, which is included in both the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standards, and is purported to have better audio quality, but other formats are still supported. MP3s are so ubiquitous that portable music players are often called MP3 players even though most play a variety of formats. Most CD and DVD players can also play MP3s.

Peer-to-peer music sharing service Napster was introduced in 1999, and it caused the popularity of the MP3 format to explode by making more digital music available than ever before. It also caused a great deal of controversy related to copyright infringement, illegal music downloads and piracy. The Recording Industry Association of America, among others, sought legal recourse against Napster as well as individual music downloaders. Napster was shut down in 2001, but other similar services popped up in its place, although perhaps none as brazen.

This newfound availability of music whetted the public's appetite for digital music, which has caused big changes in the music industry. The studios continue to fight piracy, but eventually embraced online digital music sales. Studios began licensing much of their music to companies such as Apple, whose iTunes store paved the way for a new music consumption model. Amazon is also a huge seller of digital music. And digital music sales have overtaken the sale of physical CDs. Digital music has even allowed some artists to break away from studios by giving them a means to easily distribute their own work, democratizing the system a bit. These changes have also paved the way for legitimate music streaming services that make money from advertisements and subscriptions.

MP3 also helped change how and where we listen to our music. We can record larger numbers of songs to writable CDs than could be traditionally held on pre-recorded CDs. And modern players allow us to carry thousands of songs around with us (either purchased digitally or ripped from our own CD collections). The MP3 and its successors have made entire music libraries portable.

There is some debate as to whether MP3s sound particularly good compared to other, less lossy codecs, but despite great increases in Internet speed and storage space, MP3 is still the most common digital music format, and it shows few signs of going away. There have been subsequent MP3 innovations, such as MP3Pro and MP3 Surround, both backward compatible with original MP3. People are even working on things like embedding secret messages or other hidden information in MP3s (MP3Stego, for instance). MP3 has become the norm for digital music, and until something groundbreakingly different comes along, it may remain so for a while.