Fraunhofer pages
Fraunhofer
mpeg basics
mp3 FAQ
mp3 details

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Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits is a German electronics corporation involved in a wide variety of interests. They have been instrumental in developing the technology music enthusiats call mp3.

I have copied three pages from fraunhofer's website. They are "re"-presented here for your convienice. Are you a sound freak? There is some really interesting stuff to read in here.

Fraunhofer pages
mpeg basicsmp3 FAQmp3 details

To understand Fraunhoher's invovlement in mp3 it helps to understand that the popular term "mp3" was coined to describe audio files that conform to a digital audio format supported by the MPEG Layer 3 multimedia standards. The acronym MPEG represents the Motion Picture Engineering Group which is an international organization of experts that develop and publish distribution and storage standards in an effort to facilitate a greater integration of the media arts and technologies. Today the media industry world wide uses a variety of standards such that it impedes collaboration and distribution. Standards like the MPEG layers can help make it easier to share media across the world and disciplines.

Fraunhofer is a established leader in developing digital audio transfer and storage technologies. Audio codecs which Fraunhofer originally developed for the military and telecommunications industry have been adopted as the basic model for todays mp3 music files and DVD soundtracks.

When I first heard about mp3's there was a persistant story going around the net.

It seems some hacker kids in Germany had gotten a hold of a powerful new software tool. Word was it had been leaked from a hi tech industrial research firm that specialized in cutting edge digital audio. If you were lucky you could find a hackers site with a downloadable player (decoder) and if you searched real hard you might be able to find an encoder to make your own sound files.

Apparently the hard part about getting a mp3 device was that Fraunhofer felt the technology was their property. They were hunting down developers who had created software using the Fraunhofer CODECs (or CODECs that claimed to be original but were from stolen source code) and set up a licensing system.

Eventually the mp3 CODEC became widely available on a open and public basis.

Fraunhofer continues to be regarded as the leader in the audio compression field.