Design History File
The Emergence of MP3 Players
MP3 or MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 is the most common of all audio formats that are used in transferring and playing back music on digital audio player. Moving Picture Experts Group had designed this format. The Group included Fraunhofer of Germany, AT&T-Bell Labs of USA, Thomson-Brandt, and CCETT amongst others. MP3 was given an ISO/IEC standard in the year 1991.
MP3 reduces the amount of data for recording and yet it maintains the original quality of the uncompressed audio. The MP3 can compress a CD file to one-tenth its size with a mid-range bit rate setting of 128 kbits/s. This compression is done by auditory masking. The first MP3 software encoder was released in 1994. The file extension name was initially .bit which was changed to .mp3 in 1995. Winplay3 was the first real time software released in the same year. Audio files began to be converted to MP3 files and played back in personal computers. MP3 soon spread on the Internet. The release of Winamp in 1997 and the Unix audio player mpg123 in 1998 further popularized MP3. By the later part of 1997, MP3 was being offered free at mp3.com. Peer to peer transferring of music files that are ripped from compact discs rapidly increased. Napster, launched in 1999, assisted large scale peer to peer file sharing. No doubt there was an outcry of violations of copyright leading to loss to recording companies. This was also followed by a spate of allegations and litigations.
MP3 players are mainly of three categories. There are those that are based on hard drives, micro hard drives and flash based. The larger and heavier amongst them is the hard drive based MP3 players. They have a large capacity of ten gigabytes or more comprising some 2,900 MP3 files. The micro hard rive based players are similar but compact and smaller in size and internal storage capacity. They typically have six gigabytes holding about 1,700 MP3 files. Both these categories of players have rechargeable batteries. The flash based MP3 players are very compact without any moving parts, use minimal power but having a low capacity ranging from 32 megabytes to two gigabytes. WiFi connectivity was introduced to enable download of music from the Internet and the first one to be introduced was SanDisk Sansa Connect MP3 player .
The unauthorized sharing of music files has been extensive and continues to this day. There are also a number of companies that sell music in MP3 format including Bleep, Xiie.net, Beatport, Juno Records, Amazon.com, eMusic and Zune Marketplace. Disputes on matters relating to patent and licensing over MP3 involve Fraunhofer Institute, Thomson Consumer Electronics, SanDisk, Texas MP3 Technologies, Sisvel S.p.A., Samsung Electronics, Apple, Alcatel-Lucent, Texas MP3 Technologies and some more.
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