Even if we learn all the time that some of the modern day equipment that we use, such as laptops or cell phones go a long way back, mp3 players are not something that was first invented centuries ago. If you are interested in knowing who invented the first mp3 player, know that it was made by a group of five people: Bernhard Grill, Thomas Sporer, Ernst Eberlein, Karl Heinz Brandenburg and Bernd Kurten. These five men started their work back in 1987 when they were working in the Fraunhofer Institut, on the EUREKA project, to make the digital audio broadcasting device.
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In January 1988, the MPEG was born, being a subcommittee of ISO. One year later, in April, the Fraunhofer Institut received the patent for MP3 and in 1996 the US patent was released for the MP3. SubPop was the name of the first company that started to distribute MP3 format file tracks in 1999. This was the very same year when portable MP3 players appeared. Now that you know who invented the first mp3 player, you also may be curious as to what an mp3 player is and what it can do. The abbreviation MP3 actually stands for MPEG Audio Layer 3 which means that audio files and be compressed into smaller one without interfering with the quality of the sound. MPEG stands for Motion Pictures Expert Group.

On a more technical level, here is an explanation for what an MP3 is. In general, digital audio signals are composed of 16 bit samples which are recorder at a sampling rate that is twice the bandwidth. This means that you get 1.400 Mbit for one simple second of a music files on a regular audio CD. Using this MPEG audio technology which requires coding, you can basically shrink the original data and make it 12 times smaller without losing any of the original sound quality. The first mp3 player that was actually released on the market appears to have been a huge failure and the second one was a huge success. The SaeHan Information Systems company which has its headquarters in Seoul, manages to manufacture the MPMan F10 which was a portable mp3 player that came with 32 MB of memory and it could have been extended to 64 MB.

In 1997, Tomislav Uzelac employed by the Advanced Multimedia Products Company was the one that made the first successful MP3 player since the ones produced by Frauenhofer in the 1990’s were a total disaster. In the end, it may not be that important to know who invented the first mp3 player, as the fascinating story is the ones about the invention of the mp3 technology. The portable mp3 player was one step away after this technology was developed. And the most important aspect of all is that we can now benefit from these ultra portable audio players that have been good travel companions at home, at the gym, while running in the park, on the back seat of the card, the bus and even the plane.

