MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format, designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. It was invented by a team of German engineers who worked in the framework of the EUREKA 147 DAB digital radio research program, and it became an ISO/IEC standard in 1991.

Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and MP3
The German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft developed MP3 technology and now licenses the patent rights to the audio compression technology - United States Patent 5,579,430 for a "digital encoding process". The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.

In 1987, the prestigious Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen research center (part of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft) began researching high quality, low bit-rate audio coding, a project named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).

Dieter Seitzer and Karlheinz Brandenburg
Two names are mentioned most frequently in connection with the development of MP3. The Fraunhofer Institut was helped with their audio coding by Dieter Seitzer, a professor at the University of Erlangen.
Sponsored Links

Brief History Of Time Mp3Audio Book by Stephen Hawking Listen on CD, Cassette, & DownloadLearnOutLoud.com

History Of InventionLooking to find inventions? Visit our inventions guide.InventionDirectory.info

History of inventionJoin the Ranks of Great Inventors Find history of inventionwww.MyInventions.com
Dieter Seitzer had been working on the quality transfer of music over a standard phone line. The Fraunhofer research was led by Karlheinz Brandenburg often called the "father of MP3". Karlheinz Brandenburg was a specialist in mathematics and electronics and had been researching methods of compressing music since 1977. In an interview with Intel, Karlheinz Brandenburg described how MP3 took several years to fully develop and almost failed. Brandenburg stated "In 1991, the project almost died. During modification tests, the encoding simply did not want to work properly. Two days before submission of the first version of the MP3 codec, we found the compiler error."
What is MP3
MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer III and it is a standard for audio compression that makes any music file smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. MP3 is part of MPEG, an acronym for Motion Pictures Expert Group, a family of standards for displaying video and audio using lossy compression. Standards set by the Industry Standards Organization or ISO, beginning in 1992 with the MPEG-1 standard. MPEG-1 is a video compression standard with low bandwidth. The high bandwidth audio and video compression standard of MPEG-2 followed and was good enough to use with DVD technology. MPEG Layer III or MP3 involves only audio compression.
Timeline - History of MP3

* 1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).
* January 1988 - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
* April 1989 - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3.
* 1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1.
* 1993 - MPEG-1 standard published.
* 1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later.
* November 26, 1996 - United States patent issued for MP3.
* September 1998 - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.
* February 1999 - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.
* 1999 - Portable MP3 players appear.

What Can MP3 Do
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft has this to say about MP3:"Without Data reduction, digital audio signals typically consist of 16 bit samples recorded at a sampling rate more than twice the actual audio bandwidth (e.g. 44.1 kHz for Compact Discs). So you end up with more than 1.400 Mbit to represent just one second of stereo music in CD quality. By using MPEG audio coding, you may shrink down the original sound data from a CD by a factor of 12, without losing sound quality."
MP3 Players
In the early 1990s, Frauenhofer developed the first, however, unsuccessful MP3 player. In 1997, developer Tomislav Uzelac of Advanced Multimedia Products invented the AMP MP3 Playback Engine, the first successful MP3 player. Two university students, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev ported AMP to Windows and created Winamp. In 1998, Winamp became a free MP3 music player boosting the success of MP3. No licensing fees are required to use an MP3 player.

Convert Protected Audio Into a non Protected Audio MP3

This has an additional step. That makes it work in any version of iTunes and adds some advantages.

Burn your purchased protected songs onto disc.

1. Get iTunes free for PC or Mac from the Apple web site[1].
2. Install.
3. Set your iTunes import Preference to MP3, or whatever you want.
4. Set your burn Preference to Audio CD.

Make a playlist of your iTune purchases. About 75 minutes, 15-25 songs, fills a 700-meg Audio CD.

1. From the File menu select New Playlist.
2. Drag songs from the Music Library into this playlist.

Burn these to the CD that you set to Audio disc in the Preferences.

1. Menu select File/Burn Playlist to Disc.
2. Insert CD when prompted.

Your protected songs become AIFFs on the Audio CD. This Audio disc is playable on most any CD player, including the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC's.

Why this next additional step? Click on the CD icon under Library. You'll see that the AIFFs have the iTunes store ID tags [song, album art, performer, etc.] instead of just Track 1, Track 2, etc. This information got onto your computer because you paid to download the music. But the ID tag of each AIFF track on the Audio CD is stored on your computer, not in the AIFF file. However, an MP3 carries its ID data with it. And a data CD disc of MP3s, not an audio one, will store the ID tag info carried by each MP3 file.

To make the AIFFs into MP3s and preserve this ID info, rip the songs back into iTunes like this:

1. Click the CD icon under Library.
2. Select all songs [Either CNTRL+A or CMND+A].
3. Drag your AIFFs into the Music Library. You may play them while they convert.
4. Sort the Music Library by Date Added to collect your new MP3s.

Now you have MP3 versions of the purchased songs in the Library. Plug your MP3 into the computer and when its icon comes up in iTunes, drag the MP3s onto it. Or you can transfer MP3s over WiFi to your PS3 or Xbox 360. Or transfer them using a second disc that's storing them as Data.

To Store your MP3s and their tag data:

1. Set your burn Preference to Data CD. The data CD can hold several hundred MP3s.
2. Drag your converted MP3s from the library into a New playlist.
3. Menu select File/Burn Playlist to Disc.
4. Insert another blank CD when prompted.

You can play music from a Data disc on some CD players and most computers, including the PS3 and PC's NOTE: Keep your original Audio CD of purchased songs for high-quality listening. The MP3s lose a lot in getting so small but are fine for listening on the go.


This method doesn't need a CD-R to burn on and might be a little faster. Another advantage is that you can probably burn more than 80 minutes of music at once (I never tested it, but I think it'll work). Many CD recording programs allow you to burn on a "virtual recorder", creating a CD Image file on your hard disk.

1. In Nero, do this by clicking "Recorder" > "Choose Recorder..." > "Image Recorder" and then creating a new CD as usual.
2. After clicking on "burn", you're asked where you want the file to be saved. Select a drive that has enough free space to save all the contents of the CD.
3. When Nero has finished, you need a virtual drive. Microsoft provides a free Virtual CD-ROM driver for Windows 2000 & XP at Microsoft.com
4. A (simpler) alternative to a virtual drive is to use a good unzipping program such as Izarc (free download from http://www.izarc.org) which will "unzip" the "ISO" or image file into regular audio files.
5. Right-click on your virtual drive and select "open image file..." or something similar - depending on which software you use. Then open the image file you created.
6. After loading your image file, rip the CD in the virtual drive as you would do with a normal CD.



1. Open your recording program. It should be one that can save as an MP3. If you don't have a recording program you can download Audacity, which is cool and free, but if you already have another good recording program you can use that instead. (If you download Audacity, don't forget to grab the LAME encoder.)
2. Switch your sound-recording mode. Go to your system tray (in the lower-right corner of your screen, next to the clock) and double-click on Volume Control. Pull down the Options menu and click Properties. In the "Adjust volume for" box, press Recording, check all the boxes, and click OK. Your computer is probably set to record from the microphone; check the box under "Stereo Mix". You should only need to do this once.
3. Set up your recorder. Switch back to your music-recording program and create a new file. Make sure it's in the format you want; Audacity defaults to Mono mode, so if you're using that you'll need to go to Edit -> Preferences and change the Channels drop-down box to "2 (Stereo)".
4. Do it. Once your recorder is ready, press Record. Then switch to your audio source (whether it be iTunes, Windows Media Player, or another program) and press Play. Listen to the rapturous sound of your music being freed from DRM . When the song ends, press Stop, then switch back to your recording program and press Stop there.
5. Clean up. If you're going to be using a microphone with your computer, go back to Recording Control and switch the recording mode back to Microphone. Delete any unwanted sound or silence on either end of the waveform. Amplify if necessary. Save the project (in Audacity you'll want File -> Export as MP3) and close. You're done!



1. Purchase and install Virtual Audio Cable (the demo adds "trial" clips to your sounds, so you'll need to purchase).
2. Set the playback device in your player software to the Virtual Audio Cable driver's input, and the recording device in your recording software to the Virtual Audio Cable driver's output.
3. Record using the Advanced Method above. The audio you play back and record through the Virtual Audio Cable will be a perfect digital signal, since it will never be converted to and from analog on your sound card. NoteCable Audio Converter is an example of Virtual Audio Cable.
4. If you have a Mac you can use Audiohijack (it's fully functional demo but before purchase, noise is overlaid on all hijackings longer than 10 minutes) to record any audio going through your computer. You would follow the using the Advanced Method above.


1. Use Hymn an open source application for converting protected iTunes songs to unprotected MP3 files under fair use. Download and run it according to the directions provided on the site.

* If you don't need MP3 specifically (say you have a player that won't take anything else), consider ripping to OGG instead, as it gives better sound at the same filesize and is completely free of any patents. Most rippers as well as the Audacity tip above can handle this, and many players work with it too nowadays.
* This technique works for ripping music from any source. Music and dialogue from DVDs, streaming radio, game sound effects--absolutely anything your computer can play, you can record. If you've got a favorite song from one of your DVDs, try turning its audio into an MP3 and dropping it in your playlist!
* This technique can only be used to transcode songs in real-time. The alternative is to simply burn all your protected songs to a CD and then rip them back onto the computer in the format of your choice. That only works if you have extra CD-R's, though. Of course if you use a CD-RW you can keep it specifically to convert protected audio and rip to MP3.
* You'll need to make sure that your computer is silent during the transcoding process except for the music playing. If an IM or email notification pops up, for example, and makes a noise, that will go into the recording. If you're good, you can go back in afterwards and clean that sort of thing out, but it's simpler just to turn off all your noisemakers before you start transcoding.
* Obviously you need to be able to play the file for this to work. If someone sends you a DRM-protected file that you can't open, this process won't help you. You can send the link for this page to your friend, though, and have him or her de-DRM it for you!
* If you are using iTunes version 6 or later, Hymn will not be able to remove the DRM on purchased songs. The development team is currently trying to find a way around the DRM, but Hymn will only run on iTunes verions 5 or earlier. In addition, you cannot switch to an earlier version of iTunes, because once you authorize your account with iTunes 6, you can't use anything but iTunes 6.

The History of mp3

Early 1970s: Prof. Dieter Seitzer of Erlangen-Nuremberg University in Germany begins wrestling with the problem of compressing music over phone lines. Initially refused research money to pursue the goal, he establishes a group of technicians and scientists interested in audio coding research to tackle the problem

1979: Prof. Seitzer's team develops a first digital signal processor capable of audio compression. During subsequent development, a student of Prof. Seitzer, Karlheinz Brandenburg, developed and enhanced basic principles for perceptual audio coding exploiting the hearing properties of the human ear as described in psychoacoustics. Under Seitzer's guidance, Brandenburg and the team continuously developed a number of coding algorithms.

1987: In 1987 a research alliance is formed between Erlangen-Nuremberg University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits within the framework of the European Union-funded EUREKA project EU147 for Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). Led by Fraunhofer's Prof. Heinz Gerhaeuser, the joint research project takes an important next step. With the LC-ATC (Low Complexity Adaptive Transform Coding) algorithm as the basis for its research, the joint venture began building a working real-time codec using multiple digital signal processors (DSPs). The hardware system, based on multiple DSP modules and a number of audio and data I/O interface cards, was developed from scratch by a team of scientists that included Harald Popp and Ernst Eberlein. Until now LC-ATC existed only as a simulation on minicomputers and could be tested only with very limited amount of audio material (a few audio excerpts) due to the high computation time needed. The real-time codec would enable testing of LC-ATC under real-world conditions and allow for significant additional algorithmic optimizations.

1989: Brandenburg finishes his doctoral thesis on the OCF (Optimum Coding in (the) Frequency Domain) algorithm, described by Fraunhofer as exhibiting "many of characteristics of the eventual MP3 coder, including a high frequency resolution filterbank, non-uniform quantization, Huffman coding, and side information structure." Fraunhofer contends that "the OCF coder is considered a breakthrough at that time and is a precursor of MP3." OCF scanned and removed sound below or above the threshold for human hearing. The software part of the real-time system for OCF was mainly driven by Bernhard Grill under the lead of Gerhaeuser.

1991: Incorporating contributions by Hannover University, AT&T, and Thomson, the Fraunhofer team improved the OCF algorithm which yields a powerful new audio codec called ASPEC (Adaptive Spectral Perceptual Entropy Coding). ASPEC was proposed for the forthcoming MPEG audio standard which started in 1988. MPEG in total received 14 proposals and encouraged the participants to merge their contributions, ending in four proposals which included ASPEC and MUSICAM. After formal tests MPEG encouraged MUSICAM and ASPEC to merge to create a family of three coding schemes, where Layer I was a low complexity variant of MUSICAM, Layer II was a optimized version of MUSICAM and Layer III was mainly based on ASPEC. Due to its lower complexity, DAB selected Layer II as the audio format for its digital audio broadcasting services. Although Fraunhofer's ASPEC complexity was higher, the codec provided the highest coding efficiency and therefore was the key to transmit high quality audio via ISDN phone lines. As proof of concept, Fraunhofer manufactured and sold a small number of the ASPEC studio equipment (19" racks) to professional users such as several radio stations. As a first application it was successfully used to transmit music reliably via ISDN between broadcasting studios.

The evolution from ASPEC to the final MP3 (MPEG-1, Layer 3) codec included some technological harmonizations with the other planned MPEG-1 audio coders (such as MPEG-1, Layer 2's polyphasefilterbank) and the addition of joint stereo coding, which allows the coder to not only perform well on monophonic signals but also to efficiently handle stereo material. The latter was developed by Juergen Herre for MP3.

1992: The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), the ISO (International Organization of Standardization) working group charged with developing compressed digital audio and video standards, concludes a first compression standard called MPEG-1 for use in video CDs (CD-I) . In its audio section, a generic family of three codec formats (Layer-1, -2, -3) is specified. Layer 3 is a more efficient codec and leads to its widespread adoption as a way to store music on the relatively small hard disk drives of the era's PCs and to transfer music files over the Internet through pokey 28.8kbps PC modems.

1995: MP3 gets its name. In an internal poll, Fraunhofer researchers unanimously vote for .mp3 as the file-name extension for MPEG Layer 3. MPEG Layer-3 is also selected as the audio format for the WorldSpace satellite digital audio broadcasting system.

1998: The era of MP3 portability began with the introduction of Diamond Multimedia's Rio in the U.S. and Saehan Information Systems's MPMAN in Korea. They are the first headphone stereos that used solid-state flash memory to store and play compressed MP3 music files, either downloaded from the Internet or "ripped" from a music CD. The ensuing popularity of MP3 portables led dozens of companies to offer compressed-music portables, and it led to the development of additional audio codecs for use in PCs and in portable devices.

2000: In the U.S., suppliers launch the first headphone stereos equipped with hard drives and the first headphone CD players that play MP3-encoded 5-inch CDs.

Since that time, mp3 has become a cultural phenomenon, with hundreds of millions of computers and consumer electronic devices sold that include mp3 capability.

The ability to store thousands of songs on a small portable player, search them by Album, Artist, Title, Genre, or even have play lists generated automatically, has reawakened millions of people's love for music. You no longer have to find a misplaced CD to hear a song you haven't heard for years. Your whole collection is now available at the press of a button. In fact, inexpensive 40GB mp3 players can hold over 16,000 CD quality songs, ready for immediate play, wherever you are - at home, at the beach, in your car, in the train, on the plane.

mp3 is more than a technology. It is a sensational development that has reconnected musicians to music lovers, speakers to their listeners, creators to their audience.

Behind the Music: The History of MP3

MP3, an obscure compression format that has the music industry shaking in its gold-studded boots, is surely one of the Web's most unlikely heroes.

MP3 is short for Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer III, and is a compression format that shrinks audio files with only a small sacrifice in sound quality. MP3 files can be compressed at different rates, but the more they are scrunched, the worse the sound quality. A standard MP3 compression is at a 10:1 ratio, and yields a file that is about 4 MB for a three-minute track.

It all started in the mid-1980s, at the Fraunhofer Institut in Erlangen, Germany, which began work on a high quality, low bit-rate audio coding with the help of Dieter Seitzer, a professor at the University of Erlangen. In 1989, Fraunhofer was granted a patent for MP3 in Germany and a few years later it was submitted to the International Standards Organization (ISO), and integrated into the MPEG-1 specification.

Frauenhofer also developed the first MP3 player in the early 1990s, but it turned out to be a pretty underwhelming application. In 1997, a developer at Advanced Multimedia Products named Tomislav Uzelac created the AMP MP3 Playback Engine, which is regarded as the first prime-time MP3 player. Shortly after the AMP engine hit the Net, a couple of university students, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev (who more recently created MacAMP), took the Amp engine, added a Windows interface and dubbed it "Winamp." In 1998, when Winamp was offered up as a free music player, the MP3 craze began: Music fiends all over the world started MP3 hubs, offering copyrighted music for free.

Before long, other programmers jumped in to create a whole toolset for MP3 junkies. New encoders, rippers, and players were sprouting up every week, and the movement was growing strong. Search engines made it even easier to find the specific MP3 files people wanted, and portable players like the Rio let them take MP3 tracks on the road.