MP3 Player - Narrative paper
Uploaded by manojnikku on Oct 04, 2002
In April of 1999, the term “MP3” surpassed “Sex” as the most searched on term at some of the internet’s top search engines (Hacker, Scott: P1). The MP3 format for the songs has completely changed the way people look at the world of music. It changed the way of listening to music from the conventional tapes and CD’s. MP3 stands for Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) Audio Layer-3. The MP3 format employs an algorithm and it was first developed by a German company, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, in 1987. This technology was patented in 1989 in Germany and transferred to United States in 1996 (www.webmonkey.com). The Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) was created in 1988. Originally intended for HDTV systems MP3 format has created a revolution the way music is stored and listened to by people.
The MP3 format is a compression system for music. The MP3 format helps to reduce the number of bytes in a song without hurting the sound quality. The basic function of the MP3 format is to compress a CD-quality song by a factor of 10 to 14, without spoiling the CD quality of the sound. A 32-megabyte song on a CD compresses down to 3 megabytes or so on MP3. With this method a song can be downloaded in minutes rather than hours. It is possible to store hundreds of songs on a computer's hard disk taking very little space of the hard disk. The songs can also be burned into a CD or an MP3 player. An average CD song, 3 minutes long, takes up 32 MB of space. A 3-minute MP3 song takes up about 1.6 MB, which means that approximately 20 MP3 songs can fit into the same space as one CD song (Howstuffworks.com/mp3player.htm).
MP3.com, Inc. is home to one of the largest collections of digital music on the internet. A favorite of music fans and emerging artists alike, MP3.com features streaming and downloadable music from more than 200,000 artists and over 1.2 million songs (www.MP3.com). Though MP3 players hit the market in 1997 it was 1999, when the music company “Napster” hit the internet, that the popularity of MP3 players started growing and had reached its peak. MPMan was the first portable MP3 player that was developed in 1997 by saehan a Korean Company (www.mpman.com). From the first MP3 player MPMan until today many companies have entered the market of MP3 players. Today...