A conversation with Karlheinz Brandenburg, one of the fathers of the MP3 format. He had to 1995 learn that a superior technique does not assert itself.

(Image: Albert Hulm)

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Imre Grimm Arne Grävemeyer The story behind the MP3 format Compressing Music: Problems and Solutions In competition with MP2 MP3 players and digital music sales Article in c’t 27 / 2020 read The electrical engineer and mathematician Karlheinz Brandenburg did his doctorate 1989 on the topic of music coding at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He conducted research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in Erlangen and at the AT&T Bell Laboratories in the USA.

Brandenburg, team leader Heinz Gerhäuser and seven other Fraunhofer engineers have received multiple awards: Harald Popp, Stefan Krägeloh, Hartmut Schott, Bernhard Grill, Ernst Eberlein, Thomas Sporer and Jürgen Herre. Since 2000 Brandenburg has headed the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau. In the year 2020 he went into retirement.

Imre Grimm: Mr. Brandenburg, the story is just too beautiful: Da invents a handful of German inventors from the Fraunhofer Institute developed a revolutionary process to compress music files to a fraction of their original CD size with practically no loss of quality – and thus unhinge the way of listening to music. When was the moment when they felt: We are working on something bigger here?

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