Wikipedia describes the MP3 file format as a coding format for digital audio. It’s a type of amplifier used in all professional recordings today and most of those from the last 40 years. As far as audio compression is concerned, it will be relevant today, tomorrow, and ten years from now. As we progress in all aspects of technologies, for the last couple centuries, the compression of audio has transformed and advanced significantly. According to Ntchosting’s timeline, in 1877, Thomas Edison was successful in recovering Mary Had a Little Lamb from just a strip of tinfoil wrapped around a spinning cylinder. Just a year later, the first music is put on record—Yankee Doodle, played by Jules Levy. Fast forward all the way to 1940 and we have Walt Disney’s Fantasia being released with a eight-track stereophonic sound. In 1946 tape recorders start to become popular. Shortly after, in 1948 the Audio Engineering Society (AES) is formed in New York City. Speed up to 1969 and scientists are experimenting with digital tape recording. By 1975 these digital tape recordings take hold in professional audio studios. Come 1980, Sony introduces a palm-sized stereo cassette tape player called a “Walkman.” And just two years after, Sony does it again by releasing the first CD player, the Model CDP-101. Huge changes in technology are taking place as the audio world progresses. In 1983 Fiber-optic cable is used for long-distance digital audio transmission, linking New York and Washington, D.C. Still relevant today, Apple debuts the “QuickTime” multimedia format. QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. In 1992, The Philips DCC and Sony’s MiniDisc, using digital audio data-reduction, are offered to consumers as record/play hardware and software. Data reduction grabbed the attention of everyone in the sound industry and also the consumers. Eventually, the world was introduced to the MP3 file format.
MPEG stands for Moving Pictures Experts Group which is a group created by the International Organization for Standardization (IOS). Founded in 1988, their task was to develop standards for encoded representation of both digital video and audio. In just a few years, in 1992, the MPEG-1 standard was approved. Ntchosting says that “Later, in 1994, at a meeting in Porto, the MPEG group approved the MPEG-2 standard, which gave us DVDs, DVD players and the AAC standard, used for both television and audio encoding.”
To continue, in order for me to understand what a MP3 file was, it took a lot of research just to be able to contextualize this pivotal invention in technology. I have come to notice that there are many misunderstandings on what an MP3 is and how important it was when it was invented, and how relative it still is today.
MP3 is a slightly shortened form for M-PEG 3. This is an acronym for Moving Pictures Experts Group. The ‘3’ refers to Audio Layer 3. The MP3 format’s key purpose was to reduce the file size of an audio track. Thus, taking up less space on a hard drive. This is done through a process called data compression. Techopedia explains “file compression is a data compression method in which the logical size of a file is reduced to save disk space for easier and faster transmission over a network or the Internet. It enables the creation of a version of one or more files with the same data at a size substantially smaller than the original file.” File compression is also known as file zipping. Therefore, the MP3 is a standard technology and format for compressing a sound sequence into a very small file, while maintaining the close-to original level of sound quality when it is played.
Karlheinz Brandenburg, “The Father of the MP3” second from right, in 1987 with the team he led that worked on audio compression technology.
According to Bellis 2018, the German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft developed MP3 technology. In 1987, the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute Integrierte Schaltungen research center (part of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) began researching high quality, low bit-rate audio coding, a project named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).
Bellis goes on to explain that the Fraunhofer research was led by Karlheinz Brandenburg often called the “father of MP3”. It is also said that Karlheinz Brandenburg was a specialist in mathematics and electronics and had been researching methods of compressing music since 1977. Thoughco states that ‘in an interview with Intel, Karlheinz Brandenburg described how MP3 took several years to fully develop and almost failed. Within a few years Brandenburg was able to introduce the MP3 to the world.
“The MP3 is a form designed for massive exchange, casual listening and massive accumulation. As a container technology designed to execute a process on its contents, it does what it was made to do.” –Jonathan Sterne of Mcgill University
“The MP3 file format changed the way we listened to music as it liberated people from tapes and compact discs.” – Hayley Tsukayama, a reporter for the Washington Post
For as revolutionary as the MP3 file format is to the history and growth of sound and music, the amount of research articles out there are limited. For its time, MP3 has gotten a decent amount of coverage, but as far as looking into any recent activity, one must dig deep to discover what kind of noise the MP3 is making in the world today.
The fact is, MP3’s are still all around us. In our Communication Revolutions class here at Georgian Court University, we learned about significant times in world history that has changed the way humans live, learn, interact, and so on. Starting with the printing press, all the way to technologies like Alexa, humans have invented and improved, and invented, and improved some more. It is an ongoing cycle, and as humans it is in our nature to push the envelope and keep advancing.
Technology comes and goes. For instance, we have the pencil, and will probably use the pencil for decades if not centuries to come. Even though inventions like the pen or computers with Microsoft Word have been introduced, the pencil is the kind of invention that has held on to its relativity. In contrast, the list of amount of inventions that have become outdated is endless. Something like the MP3 file format was revolutionary for its time, but shortly after it was introduced other companies came out with similar formats that were even more efficient. During its peak, the MP3 file format was extremely popular for its market. However, I do not believe its relevancy will compare even close to something as timeless as the pencil.
When the question is asked “Will the MP3 file format still be relevant in ten years?” it is important to understand that the answer to this question has a lot of grey areas. These days, you can find a plethora of audio formats in the Internet environment. Their format is usually determined by the file extension that goes after dot in the file name such as: .mp3, .wav, .ogg, .wma, etc. While audio compression and file formats will remain relevant in ten years, and beyond that, the MP3 is no longer the file format people typically use.
It is important to note that developer of MP3 has officially terminated the license of favorite audio format, and there will be no further update. However, Hayley Tsukayama goes on to make a brilliant point, that “all that’s really happened to the MP3 is that the Frauenhofer Institute has said that it’s ready to move on, let its patents expire and relinquish its licenses.” But, that is not what will contribute to the death of the MP3. In fact, she says that having the licensing of a file format expire can be liberating. “The company that made the GIF gave up its licensing in 2006, and we all know those have only gotten stronger” (Tsykayama 2017).
While that may be true, the future does not look as bright for the MP3. Technofizi dives into all the better alternatives that have came out since the MP3 saying that “AAC was launched three years after MP3, and in comparison, AAC performs way better than MP3 at the similar or same bit rates.” Although .mp3 is still more known by the public, Technofizi claims that many streaming and broadcasting services have already started using the AAC format. Even most of the APPLE services use the AAC and it’s the future of audio files.
To continue, as our technology advances so do people’s expectations. The demand for better quality audio files is what hurts the MP3’s chance of survival. Technofizi claims “If you have been in search of an ideal format that reduces the size of the audio file but maintains the integrity of quality, then FLAC is the better choice. It is true that FLAC format also compresses the original file but then also no information is lost.” These companies are simply out-doing the once popular MP3 file format.
Technofizi continues by mentioning there are other popular companies such as Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF), which was developed by Apple in order to store audio information. AIFF, as well as WAV both, are uncompressed formats. This means that these are copies of the original file but merely in a different format. There is no doubt in the fact that these files have great audio quality.
To conclude, the MP3 has been dying out for the past decade. While all MP3 format files will not just disappear, I vehemently believe a decade from now, people will continue to not use the MP3 file format while their competitors take over the market. The MP3 will never just die out and be buried but it will be significantly less used and less relevant.
karlymac 