MP3 Revolution

In 1987, a German company , Fraunhofer IIS-A, began working on a system for creating digital audio files that consumed little storage space while maintaining much of the original file’s quality. Among other things, this work was motivated by the fact that one minute of CD-quality stereo music consumed about 10 MB of storage space---storage space that at the time was very costly. The eventual result of this work was something called the MPEG Audio Layer-3 compression standard, now commonly known as MP3.

This standard uses perceptual coding techniques to eliminate audio data that the human ear is unlikely to discern. So efficient is MP3 encoding that you can use it to reduce an audo file’s size by a factor of 12 yet maintain most of the sound quality of the original file. Thanks to MP3 , a four minute song that normally would devour 40 MB of hard drive space now weighs in at less than 4 MB.