MP3 is already taken a part in your daily life as something ‘normal’. With the presence of multifunctional and small-sized MP3 players these days, you can hardly see someone without an iPod or any other MP3 players.

I stumble on a well-written knol about the history of MP3.

The knol writer, Olga Lapshinova, explained that the MP3 history started way back in 1977, when Karlheinz Brandenburg, a specialist in mathematics and electronics in Germany, started researching methods of compressing music.

Soon, as audio tech advances, the MP3 is becoming widely commercialised (and pirated) throughout the world. All this started in February 1999, when SubPop became the first company to produce and distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.

An interesting remark made by Olga - saying that the MP3 audio has become a cultural phenomenon. I couldn’t agree more to her about this.

If you want to learn about the history of MP3 in detail, please visit Olga’s excellent knol.

Image by terren in Virginia.