For Better Or Worse, MP3s Are The Format Of Choice

[The Straight Story]

The man credited with inventing the MP3 wasn't trying to turn the music industry on its head. Karlheinz Brandenburg was just looking for a way to compress music into smaller files.

The year was 1988. Brandenburg and his collaborators at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany thought they had come up with a pretty good system — until they tried it on the song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega.

Brandenburg estimates that he listened to the song more than 500 times while working on the audio technology that became the MP3. "Everything else sounded quite OK," he says, "and Suzanne Vega's voice was destroyed. So we had some work to do."


Brandenburg is a modest man, quick to share credit with his collaborators in the Moving Picture Experts Group, which gave its name to MPEG Audio Layer III — or MP3 for short. Brandenburg says he had no inkling of how popular the format would become until the mid-1990s, when he talked with an English entrepreneur.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/03/18/134598010/for-better-or-worse-mp3s-are-the-format-of-choice

[Dawson Leery]

1. kick

[SidDithers]

2. K&R. Interesting. Thanks for posting...nt

Sid

[regnaD kciN]

3. That's a little like saying "for better or for worse, nuclear is the power source for the future"...

MP3 compression destroys sound quality for anything other than the low-fi listening of iPods -- and that quality, once lost, can never be recovered.

Fortunately, downloadable, non-lossy FLACs (including some at 24/96) are becoming more common. Hearing a high-res FLAC over a good system, compared to an MP3, is like savoring prime rib instead of a Big Mac.

[Paradoxical]

4. I like using uncompressed formats. There is a difference.

[EOTE]

6. There are compressed formats which are still lossless.

And I've heard some variable bit rate audio files which are a small fraction of the original sound file which (to my ears) sound exactly like the original. Much like in video compression, there is a lot that we can't hear that doesn't need to be included in the final file.

[Javaman]

5. It is, until it's not.

10 years from now, we will have something else shoved down our throats as the new "standard".

Isn't it funny how "standards" keep changing. LOL

[RandomKoolzip]

7. You know, I was a record collector for years and years.

But I was never an audiophile. Once I got rid of my CDs and converted everything to mp3 and filled up a couple of hard drives, I was happy. My ears can't hear the difference between an mp3 produced nowadays and a CD produced fifteen years ago and I don't care. Most of what's on my iTunes is bootlegs anyway.