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MP3 turns 10!

Written By Abe Olandres
Published • July 14th, 2005
Personal Computing
3 Comments

This day, 10 years ago, the famous MP3 audio compression technology was born.

On July 14th, the name â€œMP3â€³ celebrates its tenth anniversary. On this day back in 1995, the researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS decided to use â€œ.mp3â€³ as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Soon MP3 became the generally accepted acronym for the ISO standard IS 11172-3 â€œMPEG Audio Layer 3â€³.

The original email announcing this was written in German:

Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 12:29:49 +0200
Subject: Layer3 file extension: .mp3

Hi all,

this is the overwhelming result of our poll: everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3! As a consequence, everyone please mind that for WWW pages, shareware, demos, and so on, the .bit extension is not to be used anymore. There is a reason for that, believe me :-)

Juergen Zeller

First time I encountered MP3s was the thru WinAmp, the premiere MP3 player way back in 1997. It was an uber cool thing then since you can pack hundreds of songs in your 540MB Seagate hard drive. IRC was still the primary source for sharing them.

On the sma ethought, WinAmp has gone a long long way. The earliest version I used then was WinAmp 1.5. View old WinAmp screenshots here (You can even download them and install!).

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

3 Comments

home loan says:

19 years ago

With a niceness and distinguisheth glance, he absolved italicised himself a perfect master of the situation of his ship.
home loan
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mr nice ash says:

19 years ago

pag may 3 kang mp3 sa pc mo dati, kakabilib ka na e. hehehe. ang dami na agad gustong kumopya para meron din sila…

lalo na pag may winamp ka sa pc mo. astig pc mo nun. kasi yung pc nung iba, DOS mode lagi… :)
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Kates says:

19 years ago

Yeah, I remember those days. It even came with its own ripper and encoder. I had fun converting my cd’s then.
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