IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: 

#1 The death of the mp3 was announced in a conference room in Erlangen, Germany, in the spring of 1995. The technology had failed to secure a single long-term customer. Its inventors knew it was over. They were running out of state funding, and their corporate sponsors were abandoning them.

#2 The body of research the committee was dismissing went back decades, and engineers had been theorizing about something like the mp3 since the late 1970s. Now, from this murky scientific backwater, something beautiful had emerged.

#3 In the digital age, information is stored in binary units of zero or one, termed bits, and the goal of compression is to use as few of these bits as possible. CD audio used more than 1. 4 million bits to store a single second of stereo sound. Seitzer wanted to do it with 128,000.

#4 The auditory system cancels out noise following a loud click. You can assign fewer bits to the first few milliseconds following the beat. Relying on decades of auditory research, Brandenburg was able to figure out how to compress the audio and preserve fidelity.

Summary of Stephen Richard Witt's How Music Got Free

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