The technical term is MPEG-1, Audio Layer 3. First developed by the Fraunhofer Institut fur Integrierte Schaltungen in Germany back in 1987, MP3 was originally patented in 1989 and incorporated into the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) specifications in 1992. The MP3 standard, or codec, enabled high- quality yet low bit rate compression of digital audio files. In other words, audio files, which were typically large (such as WAV files from CDs), could be compressed to a fraction of their original size without a significantly noticeable loss in quality to the human ear. 
  However, the power of MP3 did not begin to be harnessed until developers created encoding, decoding, and playing tools for the standard. The original patent holder, Fraunhofer IIS-A, made the technology free for use and development. Therefore, a number of independent developers and companies were working simultaneously to provide MP3 tools. Timing was everything. Just as home PC processing power was exploding and the Internet was taking off in 1997, researcher Tomislav Uzelac introduced the first desktop MP3 player known as AMP. AMP became the precursor to Winamp and later MacAmp, the first two widely available MP3 player applications for consumers. Soon, companies such as RealNetworks and MusicMatch jumped on the bandwagon. In May of 1999, RealNetworks introduced RealJukebox, its CD-ripping, encoding, file-management, and player application.
  In September 1998, Diamond Multimedia released its Rio 300 portable MP3 player, and by October, the RIAA battled back with a lawsuit against the company. Eventually, Diamond Multimedia won, and by the summer of 1999, the Rio 300, along with the Creative Nomad and other portable players, became the new, must-have gadgets around the world. The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), which was founded to help regulate the sharing and distribution of copyright protected music, stepped in to establish standards for the portable players. The result was that MP3 files could be downloaded to players, but not uploaded from players to PCs - at least until the SDMI came up with some sort of watermarking system that would make illegal copying extremely difficult. As of yet, it hasn't succeeded.

In January 1999, the RIAA moved on to its next foe - MP3.com, one of the largest MP3 download sites on the Web. Simultaneously, Shawn Fanning, an 18-year-old student at Northeastern University, wrote a program and protocol that allowed peer-to-peer file sharing, or sharing between computers without the need for a centralized server or Web site. This became Napster, and before it knew what hit it, the RIAA had a monster of Godzilla-sized proportions on its hands.

The rest of this story remains to be seen. With Napster's recent peace accord with media giant Bertelsmann (parent company of BMG among others), it seems that the days of unlimited free music swapping have been dealt a minor setback. But never fear: If there's a will, there's a way, and the release of other standards and codecs with faster and better compression will mean that digital audio downloading and sharing will become faster and easier than ever in the future.

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If the RIAA wants to place blame somewhere for its current predicament, it can blame everything on the invention of the compact disc, as well as Microsoft and IBM for jointly creating the WAV format. WAV is the file format for sound, and it was built into Windows 95, which in essence made it the standard for digital audio. When you rip tracks from a CD with an application like RealJukebox or MusicMatch Jukebox, you'll be converting from source files, which are in the WAV format.
 

If you're wondering why people didn't share music like crazy with WAV, it's because WAV files take up much more memory than files encoded with MP3 or other recent compression standards. For example, an hour of music encoded in the WAV format requires about 600MB of memory when a "CD quality" WAV file is encoded at 1411kbps (kilobits per second). Whereas, to achieve CD-quality sound with an MP3 file, it can be encoded at 128kbps, which requires only 32MB of storage for about an hour of music. Therefore, when WAV files are converted to MP3, it becomes much easier to store these smaller files on your hard drive or transfer them over an Internet connection.

The MP3 algorithm can compress file size significantly because it uses a psychoacoustic encoding technique. This technique capitalizes on the unique qualities of human hearing by capturing the audio that we hear best while encoding less accurately - or eliminating altogether - the audio that isn't perceptible to the human ear. MP3 files can be encoded at various bit rates - but 128kbps is considered equal to the quality of a CD even though you can record up to 320kbps with the most recent version of RealJukebox 2 Plus.

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MP3 and WMA may be the most widely used formats for music sharing, but there are a number of others available, including the widely used RealAudio format, often referred to as RealAudio G2. RealAudio G2, which belongs to RealNetworks, is a proprietary encoding format for audio and video. It is often used for streaming audio found on the Internet, and it works with Real Player or RealJukebox. The RCA Lyra  was one of the first portable players to support RealAudio G2, but unfortunately for RealNetworks, few other portable players support its format at this time.

The RealAudio format, unlike MP3, has built-in encryption and security features that allow files to be more easily controlled by the content owner. For instance, RealAudio files can be downloaded, streamed, or previewed depending on settings selected when files are encoded - WMA also has this feature. RealAudio G2 compresses files similarly to the MP3 format, where CD-quality audio is achieved at a 128kbps encoding rate. RealAudio 8 was launched in October 2000, replacing G2 as RealNetworks' standard. RealAudio 8 incorporates Sony's ATRAC3 audio compression technology, which is used with Sony's portable players and VAIO computers. And, like WMA, the new format will be able to deliver CD-quality sound at 64kbps, creating files half the size of those encoded with MP3.

More Proprietary Formats

RealNetworks and Microsoft aren't the only companies that have proprietary audio encoding formats - there are numerous others. Those you'll most likely run across out there in the wide world of digital audio include ATRAC3 from Sony, LQT from Liquid Audio, and Audible.com's formats. The difference between these formats and MP3, RealAudio, and WMA is that their primary purpose is to protect music and other audio that has been copyrighted.

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Audible.com sells audio books over the Internet, and, to protect its wares, files can be downloaded in one of four Audible.com proprietary formats. Each format takes into account the source audio, as well as which listening device will be used to play back the encoded file. Formats 1, 2, and 3 use speech compression at varying levels, while format 4 is a version of MP3 encoded at a low bit rate that works better for spoken word than music and is more efficient for downloading over the Internet. Audible makes its own desktop player, called AudibleManager, which lets its files be played on a desktop or transferred to a select group of portable players. If you're satisfied with just hearing Audible.com's content streamed over the Internet, you can use the Windows Media Player or Real Player. A few portable digital audio players and handheld PDAs support Audible files. These include the Rio 500, 600, and 800, as well as the Casio Cassiopeia, HP Jornada, and Compaq iPAQ.

Liquid Audio's LQT

Liquid Audio is one of a number of Web sites that offers downloadable music for a fee. It protects the music it offers by encoding files into its own format. Liquid Audio's format is known as LQT. If you want to play the files on your desktop, you have to use either the Liquid Player or RealJukebox. These files cannot be converted to MP3 or WAV formats, which makes them difficult to share and burn onto CDs. Liquid Audio files can be burned only to a CD if you use its software and a select group of CD recorders that support its format.

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Sony has always led the way in the world of portable audio by being the first company to introduce the Walkman and, later, the MiniDisc. But unfortunately for Sony, MP3 was nothing but a thorn in its side. Sony, unlike Diamond Multimedia or Creative Labs, is also in the business of music, and the company desperately wanted to find a way to sell portable digital audio players such as the Rio and Nomad without supporting what it saw as the illegal sharing and swapping of music with MP3. Its solution was to adapt two of its previous technologies, MagicGate Memory and ATRAC, for use in its version of "SDMI compliant and secure" portable players.

The first player Sony introduced was the Memory Stick Walkman, which used the MagicGate Memory Stick data storage card also used in Sony's digital cameras. The combination of this proprietary card and a confusing software application called OpenMG guaranteed that rogue MP3 files would be converted to Sony's ATRAC3 format before being stored on its players. The not surprisingly lukewarm reception of the Memory Stick Walkman prompted Sony to release two new players, the Network Walkman and the VAIO Music Clip.  Both relied on ATRAC3 and OpenMG as a means of keeping music secure; however, the MagicGate Memory Stick card didn't. ATRAC3 is a sound compression technology based on ATRAC, the technology used in the MiniDisc. ATRAC3 increases the sound compression rate of ATRAC by approximately one-tenth, which makes it more suitable for MP3-like portable players. Meanwhile, the OpenMG software did the dastardly deed of converting MP3 files into ATRAC3 and attaching security features to the files so that they couldn't be shared, downloaded, or even transferred to Sony's own players more than a few times. Needless to say, most consumers weren't too happy about this.

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WMA and RealAudio 8 may have the advantage over MP3: Their files are half the size at CD-quality rates. However, a newer standard called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), or MPEG-2, AAC, may give them a run for their money. AAC was codeveloped by the Fraunhofer IIS-A, Dolby, and AT&T, and it is part of the MPEG-2 specification. AAC's algorithm is different from MP3's, and AAC incorporates additional features that boost the efficiency of encoding. Basically, AAC delivers better-quality audio with 30 percent less data than MP3. AAC is widely known to be the best when it comes to audio compression, and a number of desktop players, like the new MusicMatch Jukebox 6.0, are beginning to incorporate it into the suite of codecs they support. As of today, there are no portable players that support AAC, but with its upgradable firmware, it may just be a matter of time before AAC becomes as common as MP3.

What to Look For in a Portable Player

If you're thinking about purchasing a portable digital audio player, and you want to make sure it supports the most number of codecs, definitely invest in one with upgradable firmware. Just because a player has the ability to be upgraded to support new formats doesn't mean that its manufacturer will create the upgrade. Some player manufacturers have more aggressive codec inclusion policies than others. For example, the newer Diamond Rio players (500 and up) support MP3, WMA, and Audible formats. The Rio 600 will also support AAC sometime in the near future. The RCA Lyra 2204 was one of the first players to support RealAudio G2 and MP3, but it doesn't support WMA. You get the picture. 

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ADPCM (Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation): If you buy a portable digital audio player and it has a voice recording feature, the recordings you make will be encoded in the ADPCM format. ADPCM encoding creates much smaller files than MP3 does because it's best suited to spoken audio that doesn't have complex sound.

Bit Rate: The number of bits occurring per unit of time. Bit rate is usually expressed in bits per second.

CDDB: Now called Gracenote, this Web site provides an online database of information about audio CDs. Virtually every digital audio player has the ability to access information from Gracenote over the Internet. This information includes artist, album title, song title, track length, and other information when you play, record, or rip CDs.

CD Quality: A term frequently used to describe the minimum bit rate level needed to equal CD-quality sound. A CD-quality MP3 file is encoded at 128kbps and above, whereas a CD-quality WMA file is encoded at 64kbps and above.

CD Ripper: An application that converts compact disc audio files to MP3 files or other audio encoding formats. Popular CD rippers include RealJukebox and MusicMatch Jukebox.

Codec: Short for coder/decoder or compression/decompression algorithm. Codecs are used to encode and decode or compress and decompress data.

Firmware: Firmware is defined as software or data that is in the read-only memory (ROM) of a hardware device. Firmware is found in all types of devices such as printers, fax machines, and portable digital audio players.

SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative): SDMI is a forum that brings together hundreds of companies and organizations. SDMI's goal is to develop open technology specifications that protect the playing, storing, and distribution of digital music.

Variable Bit Rate: VBR is an encoding method used by popular CD-ripping utilities. It provides a better and more consistent audio quality throughout an entire encoded file than Constant Bit Rate (CBR) encoding. VBR-encoded files are usually larger than CBR-encoded files, but they generally sound better.

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