What is one thing that almost all of us can agree to enjoy? That’s right! Music! At least in general, there are so many types and preferences and favorites that after we all agree on liking music, our tastes take us elsewhere. Our collective love of music has pushed technology for ages. Within the last century it’s been the capture of music and replaying it so that it sounds just as good as when it was recorded.
If you have a computer, there’s a good chance you have heard of Napster. Napster was the first big program to allow the masses to download an MP3 music file. In the years since Napster has gotten over its disagreements with the RIAA and signed content agreements with five major labels and countless independents. Nowadays they have over one million songs available for download and it is all legal. I will be exploring these download services in a later article.
But what’s an mp3? It’s surprising how often this question comes up in passing with my friends and family. How does that little doodad work? You put how many songs on that?
A company from Germany, Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft, developed mp3 technology and now licenses the patent rights to the audio compression technology. The project was started way back in 1987 but was based in part off of even older research. The German patent for the MP3 process was acquired in 1989 and incorporated into the MPEG-1 file format in 1992. The US patent followed in 1996.
MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group, a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
That’s great, I guess, but what does that mean for all of us? The MP3 allows us to have recorded music that has a much smaller file size than the raw recording. It compresses the very large raw music file into a smaller easier to store and share file. It is a lossy compression format. That means it is a much smaller size by discarding portions that are considered less important to human hearing. It does this by removing portions of the file taking up space that our human ear cannot hear.
In the long run what this allows us to do is have a great selection of our favorite music in a format that’s easily portable and can last a long long time. As I continue this series, I will be going into how you can rip MP3s from Compact Discs that you already own. I’ll be looking at legal digital download stores. We will look at the legality of MP3s and what you can and can’t do with them. And if there is some interest, I will also go over portable MP3 players and review some in a few different price ranges for both you and your kids. And if your kids haven’t started asking about an MP3 player, there’s a good chance they will soon. MP3 players are what the Walkman and Diskman were to us more seasoned music fans.
Do you find yourself using the MP3 format a lot? On your computer or an MP3 Player or a burned CD?