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N0KFQ > TODAY 14.07.10 18:31l 62 Lines 3081 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Jul 14
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Sent: 100714/1617Z @:N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA #:12020 [Branson] FBB7.00i $:12020_N
From: N0KFQ@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
To : TODAY@WW
Jul 14, 1995:
A revolutionary new technology is christened "MP3"
Representatives of the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA) were not in attendance at the 1995 christening of the
infant technology that would shake their business model to its
core just a few years later. Known formally as "MPEG-1 Audio
Layer 3," the technology in question was an efficient new format
for the encoding of high-quality digital audio using a highly
efficient data-compression algorithm. In other words, it was a
way to make CD-quality music files small enough to be stored in
bulk on the average computer and transferred manageably across
the Internet. Released to the pubic one week earlier, the
brand-new MP3 format was given its name and its familiar ".mp3"
file extension on this day in 1995.
The importance of MP3, or any other scheme for compressing data,
is made clear by some straightforward arithmetic. The music on a
compact disc is encoded in such a way that a single second
corresponds to approximately 176,000 bytes of data, and a single
three-minute song to approximately 32 million bytes (32MB). In
the mid-1990s, when it was not uncommon for a personal computer
to have a total hard-drive capacity of only 500MB, it was
therefore impossible to store even one album’s worth of music on
the average home computer. And given the actual connection speed
of a then-standard 56K dial-up modem, even a single album’s
worth of music would have taken literally all day to transfer
over the Internet. In this way, the nature of the CD format and
the state of mid-90s computer and telecommunications
technologies offered the music industry a practical barrier to
copyright infringement via Internet file-sharing. But then came
MP3.
Over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, several teams
of audio engineers worked to develop, test and perfect the
standard that would eventually gain the blessing of Motion
Picture Experts Group (MPEG). Their approach took advantage of
certain physical and cognitive characteristics of human hearing,
such as our inability to detect the quieter of two sounds played
simultaneously. Using a "perceptual" compression method,
engineers were able to eliminate more than 90 percent of the
data in a standard CD audio file without compromising sound
quality as perceived by the average listener using standard
audio equipment.
Suddenly, that digital copy of your favorite pop song took up
only 2-3 MB on your hard-drive rather than 32MB, which in
combination with the growth in average drive capacity and the
increase in average Internet connection speed created the
conditions for both the rampant, Winamp- and Napster-enabled
copyright infringement of 1999-2000 and for the legal commercial
distribution of digital music via the Internet. In the eyes of
the RIAA, those are the conditions that also explain the 29
percent decline in the sales of music CDs between 2000 and 2006.
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
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