Invention of the MP3

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2023

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Professor Karlheinz Brandenburg from Germany spent more than a decade developing MP3 technology, which was developed to convert audio into digital form. He had been working on it since 1982. It compressed music into a file size that made it easier to transmit, leading to the first MP3 players and fast music sharing. Laura Jones has been speaking to Professor Brandenburg. (Photo: Karlheinz Brandenburg wearing headphones, with his team. Credit: Fraunhofer IIC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	When you meet someone online, can you trust they are who they say they are?
0:04.3	Good evening, my love. It's all well planned.
0:08.1	She was trying to get me to send her money.
0:10.7	Love Genessa is a true crime podcast from the BBC World Service and CBC podcast,
0:16.0	exploring the world of online romance scams, and it's available now.
0:20.1	Find it wherever you found this podcast.
0:22.4	Thanks for downloading the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service,
0:32.8	with me, Laura Jones. In this episode, we're going back to the moment which
0:37.4	changed the way we listen to music, the invention of the MP3.
0:43.5	It's 1998, and the BBC's music TV show Inside Tracks is reporting on a music revolution,
0:51.2	where you can download your favourite songs to your computer for the first time.
0:56.0	He's still clinging to the past then with old-fashioned compact disc,
1:00.0	because, of course, anyone who knows anything about the future will tell you that soon your
1:04.0	CD collection will be obsolete, obsolete in a world where every song ever recorded
1:09.6	is available to you on tap rather than on tape.
1:13.1	And Carl Heinz Brandenberg from Germany has just realised his MP3 technology has made it big.
1:20.0	I was visiting Hong Kong, and I looked into the display of an electronic store,
1:27.2	and they had 30 different kinds of MP3 players there.
1:32.0	And then I thought, OK, we've done it, nobody can stop it again.
1:36.8	It took years and years to get to the point of being able to push a button and
1:41.3	play a song on an MP3 player. It was 1982 when Carl Heinz was first set the challenge of cutting
1:47.9	down the size of music files so they could be sent easily between computers.
	...

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