Videocasts celebrate 20 years of audio coding

Back in 1987 a breakthrough in audio coding activities was achieved at Fraunhofer IIS with the introduction of the first real-time implementation of a predecessor of mp3.

In 2007, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS is celebrating 20 years of audio coding.

Back in 1987 a breakthrough in audio coding activities was achieved at Fraunhofer IIS with the introduction of the first real-time implementation of a predecessor of mp3.

The German research institute is commemorating this milestone with a range of events including the release of videocasts on its website that deliver an insight into the development of mp3 and the early days of audio coding.

It all started back in the 1970s with the goal of compressing music for transmission over phone lines.

Developments in the following years provided the basis for modern audio coding algorithms and, in May 1987, led to a real-time implementation of the low complexity adaptive transform codec, in short LC-ATC.

That way, music could be compressed in real-time for the first time - a huge advantage as before compression of audio signals took hours even using high performance computers.

This implementation of mp3's forerunner started the rapid development process that eventually resulted in the later standardisation of MPEG Layer-3, better known as mp3, in 1992.

Now, the engineers of Fraunhofer IIS tell in videocast episodes about these exciting times and how development of mp3 affected their everyday life.

The videocasts are released every two weeks as download and streaming videos.

Additionally, the mp3 history is offered as mp3 podcast.

Release of the videocasts is only the beginning of a series of events and workshops celebrating 20 years of audio coding at Fraunhofer IIS.

The highlight will be the Day of Audio Coding on 25th May 2007.

Today, Fraunhofer IIS is the leading international research lab for audio coding.

After the development of mp3 and vital contributions to MPEG AAC, engineers at Fraunhofer IIS are now working on new algorithms for compressing surround audio at very low bitrates, such as mp3 Surround and MPEG Surround.

The institute is also active in the field of digital rights management, communication technologies, digital broadcasting and video coding.

This makes Fraunhofer IIS to the first address for solutions for tomorrow's multimedia world.

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