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Music Technology

MP3 Turns 25 (hackaday.com) 80

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
ArchieBunker writes: In the streaming era, music is accessed from a variety of online services, ephemeral in nature and never living on board the device. However, the online audio revolution really kicked off with the development of one very special format. The subject of bitter raps and groundbreaking lawsuits, this development from Germany transformed the music industry as we know it. Twenty-five years on from the date the famous '.mp3' filename was chosen, HackADay takes a look back at how it came to be, and why it took over the world.
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MP3 Turns 25 More

MP3 Turns 25

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  • I so miss MP3.com (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:10PM (#60336185)
    it was a massive source of cool new music all easily searchable. A bunch of bands were making their living off it too. There are rumors that the real reason the record labels came down on them like a ton of bricks is that they were afraid musicians wouldn't do business with them if they could make a living without them.

    • Re: I so miss MP3.com (Score:5, Informative)

      by t4eXanadu ( 143668 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @02:34PM (#60336719)

      Yeah, mp3.com was great. The internet in general has been amazing, from a music listener's standpoint. I wouldn't have discovered any of the music I love without it. Had I relied on radio and word-of-mouth through friends, my musical tastes would be considerably more restricted than they are now.

      Bandcamp is good successor to mp3.com, and I say that as both a music producer, and as a listener.

    • Some of that music can't ever be found again. I was a fan of the Israeli band Purple Wage and couldn't stop listening to their songs "Tired", "Daydream" and "Indeed" on MP3.com

      After the site went down, I couldn't find that band again. It simply vanished.

      And I can't find those damn mp3 files on my backups :-(

      • called Frostweaver. It's damn near impossible to even google them because "Frostweaver" is World of War Craft enemy. I managed to find this [youtube.com]. But it's one of 2 or 3 recordings of the song, and there's 5 songs or so from their MP3.com days that I've lost.

        I had a band offer to send me their songs by FTP, but I was a dumbass and couldn't figure out how to set up a public FTP back then :P.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by btroy ( 4122663 )
      I remember MP3.com. Like others, I discovered music you couldn't find through mainstream. I even bought a couple of the MP3.com CD's for artists I really appreciated. They were interesting in that they were CD's that you could play in any CD player plus they also had MP3's on them.

      If I remember a 3 minutes 128kbs took somewhere around 30 minutes to download.

    • The court decision against MP3.com was a gross miscarriage of justice. They lost because they were so far ahead of their time that the courts didn't understand what they were doing.

      The service that did them in was one that let you upload your own CDs, which were then available to stream from anywhere. (At the time that mostly meant on an office computer or one at a friend's house; mobile devices capable of doing that were just starting to emerge.) But in most cases they didn't actually upload your CDs; they

  • I remember my first (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:13PM (#60336191)

    First MP3 I downloaded was "The Verve - Freshmen" - on a 33.6Kbps modem. I normally downloaded MIDI files to listen to. Had no idea why this format was so "big" (compared to a MIDI anyways). Surprised the hell out of me when I downloaded WinAMP and the actual fucking song started playing. I was expecting some instrumental rendition.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      I first ripped tracks from CDs when I only had a 250MB HDD and the 1-speed CD-ROM drive needed a sound card to get data in (no mobo connection). Encoding a track to mp3 took forever with a 486sx + CoPro and Blade turned out not to be a great encoder.

    • pretty much the same; only it was "six underground" by sneaker pimps. Our 486 had a COM port conflict between the mouse and modem; so data would only transmit when the mouse was moved.

      Also the computer was so anemic that when playing an MP3 (I should say "the" mp3, as it was the only I had) the computer would be rendered unusable, and it took a good minute or so to start playing. Still, fond memories of that time period (of course I was 11 or so, but that's besides the point.)

      Back then, it was a completel

    • First song I ever downloaded was Ray of Light by Madonna. It wasn't in MP3 format, it was .WAV. 50MB. took like 12 hours to download via 56k AOL connection. This was back in '98.

      This may be hard to believe, but people were trading .WAVs via AOL mail (upload once, forward endlessly), before napster or mp3 were big.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Except that "The Freshmen" wasn't by The Verve, but by The Verve Pipe. May serve to show that the tradition of mislabeling MP3s is just as old as the medium itself.

    • Santiago by Loreena McKennitt for me. And yes, it was unbelievably impressive.

      • If you like Loreena McKennitt her 2 CD album Live in Paris and Toronto is "essential" for any fan. :-)

        • Yep, that is an excellent album. And I do like her, even have a personally signed album and a photo together. It's not the kind of music I usually listen to, but she has the best voice ever.

    • First MP3 I've seen was split (with ARJ of course) on two 1.44M floppy discs. Had to play it in winamp at "1/4" quality on my 486.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      I think mine was Mustang Sally. However, it might had been a MP2. Remember that format? ;)

    • I don't remember the first MP3 I downloaded, but given I still have most of the MP3's I downloaded back then, I could figure it out from the timestamps should I fire up the desktop. I'll have to remember to check that.

      Most of my early MP3 acquisitions were from various public FTP servers you could get onto. I don't recall anymore how I found out about the servers - might have been through Usenet. Some servers you could leech, others had "ratios" which required you upload something before you could downlo

  • I still have an mp3 from 1997. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:15PM (#60336199)

    It sounds much better than modern mp3s. The bits back then were of higher quality, and have that vintage vibe to them which translates into a sonic quality that is more authentic. Once hear the care and craft that Winamp imparted when it encoded that song Rico Suave. I'll never part with this mp3.

    • The bits back then were of higher quality, and have that vintage vibe to them which translates into a sonic quality that is more authentic.

      Nah, you just have an mp3 that predates the worst atrocities committed during The Loudness War [wikipedia.org].

    • Re:I still have an mp3 from 1997. (Score:5, Funny)

      by jm007 ( 746228 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:45PM (#60336297)
      just wait till you hear it over Monster cables, O.M.G.

      I have a box of vintage bits on order and when they arrive, all my vinyl will be encoded with them exclusively

    • Re: I still have an mp3 from 1997. (Score:5, Funny)

      by JockTroll ( 996521 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @01:02PM (#60336375)
      Yeah. The bits back there were lovingly hand-made, each 0 and 1, by dedicated artisans who took pride in their craft. Now they mass-produce whole kilobytes in some sweatshop.

    • Damn, I wish I had mod points.

    • Especially if you used gold plated Monster cables. Don’t make cables like they used to make.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pavon ( 30274 )

      Damn straight. Kids and their variable bit rate encodings went and ruined everything. CBR was far more egalitarian approach, forcing music to focus on what was important, and deliver that consistently through the song. And don't get me started on those improved "psycho-acoustic" models - bunch of mind reading nonsense. If the artist didn't expect me to hear certain sounds they wouldn't have included them in the recording. Stop trying to trick and God and Nature and deliver the music with a consistent honest

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by teg ( 97890 )

      It sounds much better than modern mp3s. The bits back then were of higher quality, and have that vintage vibe to them which translates into a sonic quality that is more authentic. Once hear the care and craft that Winamp imparted when it encoded that song Rico Suave. I'll never part with this mp3.

      There were better bytes back then - more ones less zeroes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DeVilla ( 4563 )
        They were more deliberate with their bytes. They didn't try to pack so many in a word.

  • Given all the shitty hot takes when the last patent expired, didn't MP3 die in 2017?

    • Have all the patents really expired? I haven't followed those developments recently, but I remember hearing it varied by jurisdiction.

      In any case, the patents were just one reason, and not even the biggest, to switch to something better. It hasn't been competitive by any technical measure in over 15 years - at this point, that constitutes the majority of its lifespan.

    • So an expired patent means something can no longer be used?

    • didn't MP3 die in 2017

      Only if you misread the statement. What actually died was the licensing program for the patents held by Fraunhofer IIS. Mind you this same organisation (and the inventors of the format) also announced it was dead in 1995.

      And since we all know the internet consists entirely of cats, it presumably has 7 further deaths to go.

  • Back when fast networks were hard to come by (Score:3)

    by szczys ( 3402149 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:19PM (#60336211)
    I remember downloading MP3s from an FTP server onto Zip disks. It was incredible technology since it was replacing MOD files as the bandwidth-friendly audio file.

  • Somewhere I still have my Napster music (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:32PM (#60336247)
    I still have a backup of the music I "acquired" through the original Napster.

  • Memories (Score:3)

    by Bohnanza ( 523456 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:33PM (#60336255)
    I can remember having a conversation with my brother about this new-fangled format, and telling him that I thought people might be willing to pay up to $1 a song. He convinced me that the idea was ridiculous, that nobody would pay for what they could steal, and if they were so stupid they wouldn't know what to do with it anyway.

  • More than 25 years (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:34PM (#60336261)
    The Philips DCC 900 digital cassette player, released in 1992, was the first recordable MP3 player - before it was called mp3.

    Unlike DAT recorders, it looked like an ordinary cassette player, the tapes looked like ordinary cassette tapes, it played ordinary cassette tapes - but it also played and recorded mp3 at a rather low bitrate.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Brama ( 80257 )

      It specifically mentions the filename extension (.mp3), the encoding standard had been defined far earlier indeed and was originally implemented for CD-I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:More than 25 years (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27, 2020 @01:08PM (#60336389)

      The Philips DCC 900 digital cassette player, released in 1992, was the first recordable MP3 player - before it was called mp3.

      Nope.
      DCC was using a at the time proprietary encoding scheme (Philips PASC) at 384kbit/s.
      The same encoding scheme was later submitted for and adopted as MPEG1 Audio Layer 1 aka mp1.

    • DCC used PASC. That said, MPEG copied / extended on what was done with PASC, calling it MPEG Layer 1 [wikipedia.org], later evolving that into MP3.

      I remember DCC. I remember how good they sounded, compared to analog cassettes. Could never afford them at that time, though. I recall they had a sliding metal shutter, to protect the tape, kinda like the sliding shutter on a 3.5" floppy.
  • ... or, at least almost selling one. I worked at CompUSA back when it first hit retail as arguably the first commercial portable MP3 player for the mass market. One night someone with a little more money than good sense asked me what was "new" and I pulled it out from the case to show him. Unfortunately our corporate overlords wouldn't grant us a working demonstration unit for customers to actually interact with; I certainly could have made the sale that night if only we had that.

    Regardless I still sold more mp3 players, PDAs, and cameras (long before smart phones of course) at that store than anyone else from that day until the whole corporation imploded.
    • I purchased a 64mb version and loaded it with (live) bootlegs and B sides and played it through my aux Jack in my car.

      It was worth every penny. Much longer life than my discman, and could listen to stuff I couldn't get on CD at the time.

      It was around $90 when I got it, there were newer ones out (but I think they were all still Rio's).
      • As I recall, the majority of SmartMedia cards that I sold back in the day went into one of three types of devices:
        • Olympus digital cameras (though they later moved to XD, and then to SD)
        • AFGA digital cameras (which don't exist in this country any more and haven't for some time, in spite of their impressive features)
        • Diamond Rio MP3 players

  • MP3 CD Player Changed My Life (Score:3)

    by eepok ( 545733 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:57PM (#60336349) Homepage

    I heard my friends talking about being able to download albums of free music from various FTP servers in high school (I didn't have a computer, but learned at school) and they offered to burn CDs of MP3s for me if I wanted should I ever get a way of playing them. Scanning through a local 2nd hand music store in town, I saw a used MP3-CD player that apparently the user just didn't understand. The shop owner sold it to me for $20. Within a month I had access to 50 albums of music when I originally had 5 to my name. It was almost as amazing as getting my first modern computer.

    I've spent a lot of money on going back and purchasing many of those albums or at least paying for subscription access to listen to them legitimately.

    • I've spent a lot of money on going back and purchasing many of those albums or at least paying for subscription access to listen to them legitimately.

      Incidentally, I've pirated some CDs I had stolen out of my car.

  • *While browsing the "Network Neighborhood"*
    Huh, here's a computer. I think I'll click on it.
    *clicks*
    Fiddle dee dee, what are all these curious .mp3 files?
    *downloads files and winamp*
    Holy shit this is the actual song! All the music I ever wanted is here!
    *spends the next month downloading every song ever*

    Soon thereafter I discovered what the PR0N file shares were, and that was it for my freshman year grades.

  • I switched to AAC at least a decade ago.

    • Opus is better quality and doesn't have ridiculous license fees on decoders:
      https://www.opus-codec.org/ [opus-codec.org]

      • When does the end user ever need to actually worry or care about a decoder license fee though?

        Either your devices are going to support it already or they aren't. Someone had to pay the fee whether you use it or not. I've never encountered a device that didn't support AAC, so it's already a paid for cost.

        I have run into plenty of devices that don't support Opus, and in particular my phone, which makes it a non-starter for me.

        But if I did switch to Opus, none of my playback devices suddenly become cheaper s

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        People use AAC more than Vorbis for music though. Though Vorbis is VERY popular in the gaming arena - a lot of mobile and PC games use Vorbis as their music and sound format. Many even leave the .ogg files littered about the game directories.

        The problem is/was Vorbis decoding was hard. It may be free, but no one could write a decoder that fit in the cache of the decoder DSP. This meant back in the day you could get 30 hours of MP3 playback off an single AA battery, and 25+ hours using AAC, it dropped to lik

    • Did you re-encode all your MP3s to your fancy new format? I heard you get better bits that way, I mean everyone knows a 160kbps AAC runs rings around a 160kbps MP3s.

      Or maybe you're smarter than that and instead deleted all your old music a decade ago and started fresh because a new format came out.

      • No

        My library is stored on my file server in FLAC.

        Lossy formats are just for local storage on my portable devices or for streaming over a metered or slow network connection.

        • So basically you're not using the formats in any way that normal people are. I can understand why you'd be confused about the concept of people still having MP3s.

          • /Oblg. Not sure if stupid or if trolling. /s

            "Defending" normal people for being too stupid to understand the difference between lossless (FLAC, AAC, ALAC, etc.) and lossy compression (.mp3) is "priceless." Are you really that stupid to believe that if someone knows about FLAC that they also don't understand the downsides of .mp3? They even specifically wrote their use case. Did you even fucking READ the OP's last sentence??

            Just because _you_ don't care about quality, let alone understand why it is importa

    • I switched to AAC at least a decade ago.

      I switched away, then switched back when storage got cheaper. It's still the most widely supported format and to me it's good enough by the time you hit 256 kpbs. With modern encoders, it's actually pretty decent at any bitrate, it's just the files I encoded early on that sound terrible.

      • I still have MP3s. Some local bands I know don’t sell albums via CDs but with USB drives especially if they are selling multiple albums.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by pavon ( 30274 )

        Same here. Switched to AAC / Ogg Vorbis, then back to MP3 because unlike those two formats support was ubiquitous, storage had become cheap, encoders had gotten better, and with the patents expired it was legal to use with OSS.

        I suspect that the same will occur with video in a few years. H.265, H.266, VP9 and AV1 are duking it out to be adopted as the next major codec, but when it is all said and done H.264 will be the winner. With the exception of niches like 8k video, it is good enough, ubiquitously suppo

  • I was offered stock in mp3.com when they went public. I bought 50 shares - it went from $28 starting price to $104 in the first minute of going public, and so I sold it. I got to be on the IPO because I had bought some software from them. I think that site had a lot to do with compressed music taking off.

    Long before this I remember converting an entire album using MP3 command line tools in DOS, which was an overnight project for my computer at the time. Had a lot of trouble getting enough hard drive spa

  • I was running Linux by then, and had a 1X HP CD burner in my Linux Box, and Sony had just come out with a DiscMan that played MP3 discs. So I used Lame to rip CDs. You could get 100 songs on a CD! Got rid of the all my cassette tapes and replaced them with a few CDs. Ran with that setup until 2010 or so.

  • Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

    • Did the patents expire? Most of the patents would be in successive technologies like AAC. What has happened is the patents are now royalty free to use for different functions like decoding and encoding. Companies that create encoders still require licensing as far as I know. MP3 licensing at this point might be cheap though.

  • MP3 Players I've Owned (Score:3)

    by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @01:38PM (#60336509)
    My first MP3 player was an Archos Jukebox [wikipedia.org], circa 2000. It was chunky but had acceptable audio quality and battery life and a 6GB hard drive before the iPod was released. I remember that it didn't index the songs, you navigated the folder structure (I forget how you made playlists, but they were possible). I liked this setup because it's how I kept my music organized on my PC, too.

    Some time later I got a Zune 30, the classic brown one people love to hate on. I'll say it again: it was a very nice looking device in person. In retrospect MS should have just conceded the cool factor to Apple and focused on the better sound quality and desktop software, both of which they had. I upgraded to a Zune 80, which was great until the battery crapped out after a few years.

    For the last nine years or so I've been using a Sansa Clip+ [wikipedia.org] with Rockbox [wikipedia.org] and a 32 GB SD card. I've had to re-solder the headphone jack twice, but I haven't found anything I like better for listening to music.

    I like that my phone plays music, but also like having separation from it when all I want is the music.

  • Best we had before that time were mod players. Had a decent sound card though, and synthesizer software, midi keyboard, . And we had a bunch of CD's.

    So what we did was convert those CD's to mp3, because that was a new and convenient storage, and hd space being limited very welcome. It's just that converting a CD to mp3 took ages. Dumping the CD was fast enough, but converting a single song to mp3 would take an hour or more, on our 266MHz boxes.

    With help of some batch scripts we let a bunch of computers crun

  • Downloaded MP3s 24/7 for weeks. xD

  • What impressed me most about mp3 when I first encountered it in the late 90's via napster was that somebody had managed to make audio sound even worse than the lowest quality recording/duplicating ATRAC codec on my Sony Minidisc deck and portable. And all these years later it still sounds like shit! Thank God for flac.

  • Everyone should seriously thank God that patents don't last as long as copyright, otherwise we'd be well into the 22nd century before you'd be able to freely distribute the mp3 codecs.

    Modern copyright terms are serious bullshit.

  • I Don't Subscribe to Music. Still Use MP3s & A (Score:3)

    by Vandil X ( 636030 ) on Monday July 27, 2020 @04:22PM (#60337061)
    Call me old-fashioned, but I still like to own my music. My library has been ripped to MP3s and later AACs, and I still buy songs off iTunes.

    Also, much of what I ripped to MP3s back in the day are simply not available as streamed content, especially from smaller artists or esoteric remixes.

    So long as my Superdrive works in my MacBook, I'll keep ripping.

  • Because without Winamp, mp3 would not have been such a success.

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