MP3 Turns 10

Precisely ten years ago, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS researchers have adopted the "mp3" term as the extension name for the new music compression technology. Although few know about this date or about the fathers of MP3, this music encoding format is one of the best known in the whole world.

Choosing the MP3 name was done through an internal poll, the majority of those involved in the project going for this acronym of ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3. It was announced then that MP3 was to replace the existent .bit extension from all the WWW, software solutions and demos.

The international compatibility of the format has been ensured since 1992 by standardization, so that billions of users would be able to play these files. The only problems faced by the Fraunhofer programmers in 1992 was that the MP3 represented a far too complex technology to what the market was capable of at that time, and its implementation in an application would have been premature.

However, establishing some basic guidelines that would channel the digital format was more than welcome, and the standard has managed to dominate the market ever sincem despite the attempts made by WMA, OGG or other formats.

The MP3 has evolved since then, and in January, this year, with the help of a new multichannel codec, the format gained surround capabilities. The innovative format will make music files occupy twice less space than 5.1 audio files created with other compression technologies.