Newborns wearing headphones listen to classical music in a hospital maternity ward in Kosice, eastern Slovakia to help them adapt better to life after birth.  Photo Copyright: Frantisek Ivan

On July 14th, the name "MP3" celebrates its tenth anniversary!!   On this day back in 1995, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, Germany decided upon the filename extension ".MP3" for their new audio coding technology.   Soon MP3 became the generally accepted acronym for the ISO standard IS 11172-3 "MPEG Audio Layer 3" designed to greatly reduce the amount of data (10:1 compression is common) required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners.

As mentioned in my Digital Music Project blog post back in February, we’re big fans of digital music, so happy birthday, MP3.   Rock on!
 

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