MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MP3 for short has become a common audio format that is deployed to transfer and playback music on digital audio player. It was designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group which included amongst others, Fraunhofer of Germany, Thomson-Brandt, AT&T-Bell Labs of USA, and CCETT. It obtained an ISO/IEC standard in 1991.
The data for recording is reduced substantially with the use of MP3 format. Use of MP3 however did not reduce the original quality obtaining in the uncompressed audio. A CD file can be compressed by MP3 to one-tenth its original size with a 128 kbits/s mid-range bit rate setting. The compression is obtained by auditory masking. The first MP3 software encoder was launched in 1994. In 1995 the file extension name .bit when it was launched, was changed to .mp3. The first real time software Winplay3 was introduced in 1995 itself. Conversion of audio files to MP3 files enabled playing back the audio in the personal computers. The Internet soon became a hub for MP3. MP3 got a real boost with the launch of Winamp in 1997 followed by the Unix audio player mpg123 in 1998. mp3.com began to offer MP3 free towards the last quarter of 1997. Compact discs were ripped and the music files began to be transferred from one to another. This peer to peer file sharing increased with the introduction of Napster in 1999. There was a hue and cry that copyright violations spread like wild fire. Recording companies claimed that this has affected their business that the whole recording industry was just about to fall apart. Allegations in the media and litigations in the court piled up.
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 4GB 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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