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.
And now we can buy music in superior formats like Flac.
b_tr3e@feddit.org 16 hours 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.social 16 hours ago