Who Invented The MP3 Player ?

MP3 technology and its development is linked with the name of a German company - Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft. The research centre of a prestigious institute - Fraunhofer Institut – is part of the previously mentioned German company, which started o project in 1987 (EUREKA project EU147), with the sole aim to research high-quality, low bit-rate audio coding. The institute was assisted in this research by Dieter Seitzer, who was professor at the University of Erlangen.

The Fraunhofer Institute research was run by Karlheinz Brandenburg, a specialist in electronics and mathematics who had actually been involved in researching methods of compressing music for at least 10 years at the time the project started. That is why he has often been referred to as the ‘father of MP3’.

The project that began in 1987 came to an almost complete standstill; the several modification tests they carried out simply did not help the encoding work properly. However, it didn’t take long for the compiler error to be found and the first version of the MP3 codec was submitted. The German patent for MP3 was obtained in 1989 with the USA patent being issued in 1996.

The first record company to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format was SubPop. They began this kind of activity as early as 1999. During the same year, the first portable MP3 players appeared and thus modern technology brought another spectacular invention for our use that would change the way we music would be listened to.

Frauenhofer had a go at producing the first mp3 player in the early 1990s but, unfortunately, this was a failure. Seven years later, developer Tomislav Uzelac of Advanced Multimedia Products managed to turn his idea into reality and the first successful MP3 player – the AMP MP3 Playback Engine – was born.

The MPMan F10, developed by SaeHan Information Systems headquartered in Seoul, a 32MB portable with a memory that had the option to be upgraded to 64MB, is known as the first portable solid state digital audio player sold in the USA but the Rio PMP300 which appeared later had a much better reception. Ever since, things have improved considerably and the third millennium surely has some great advancements andsurprises in store for us.