Meet the men behind the MP3 format

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May 1, 2000
Web posted at: 8:48 a.m. EDT (1248 GMT)

by Michael Learmonth

(IDG) -- Last year "MP3" overtook "sex" as the most-searched-for term on the Internet. No one (with the possible exception of Hugh Hefner) was more surprised than Dieter Seitzer and Heinz Gerhauser, the men who oversaw development of the MP3 digital-music format at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, Germany.

There are fancier formats for recorded music on the Web, but MP3 is by far the most popular. One recent estimate put the number of MP3 tunes online at half a million.

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Though the creation of the MP3 format -- technically MPEG 1 Audio Layer 3 -- was the product of many minds, it was the Fraunhofer team, led by Seitzer and Gerhauser, that made the most significant breakthroughs. Seitzer, 66, ran the institute from 1985 until 1993; Gerhauser, 54, has been in charge since 1993.

The triumph of MP3 made the institute in Erlangen the largest of the 47 Fraunhofer facilities in Germany. For Gerhauser, who is also a professor at the University of Erlangen, the success is gratifying, but it means he spends more time in corporate boardrooms than in the classroom.

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"I actually wear two hats," he says. "On the one hand, I am head of a big institute that has to earn about 85 percent of its expenses by contract research. So I am a businessman. On the other hand, as a university professor, I have to teach students and conduct research in the academic world."

When MP3 research began at Fraunhofer, under Seitzer, it took 10 hours for a mainframe computer to decode one minute of digitized music. Then one of Seitzer's grad students, Karlheinz Brandenburg, wrote a groundbreaking thesis arguing that compressed audio could be decoded in real time. Fraunhofer researchers went to work on an algorithm that would make decoded music as realistic to the human ear as possible.

The Layer 3 algorithm they came up with compresses music by filtering out sounds that are inaudible to the human ear. Without the flotsam, a sound file can be compressed to one-tenth its previous size.

But to make the format universal, it needed an international standard. That came in 1988, when the Moving Pictures Experts Group, or MPEG, was established. Then, in 1995, Fraunhofer researchers released Windows-compatible Winplay, the first player that could decode MP3 files on a personal computer in real time. Soon, as modem and microprocessor speeds increased, MP3 had a place on home computers.

The format soared when software like Napster, a file-sharing program released last year, allowed surfers to search for and swap MP3 files with other users.

"It's the people's tool. The beauty of it is that no one controls it," says Bruce Haring, author of Beyond the Charts: MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution. "I don't think its full impact has been realized yet."

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