The late American entrepreneur Steve Jobs - who worked as president of Apple Electronics - introduced the first iPod in 2001, to spread the concept of "A Thousand Songs In Your Pocket".
This revolution supported MB3 files using compressed audio data, in an invention that dates back to a team of researchers in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany - and not in California, USA, as some think - 25 years ago in July 1995.
This technology - developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Society for Research - managed to put hundreds of songs on a relatively small hard drive.
In theory, the project goes back further. In 1982, a research student undertook to find a way to make the music data small enough to be transmitted over digital phone lines or the ISDN, while maintaining a high level of the quality.
The student, Karlheinz Brandenburg, chose what seemed to be an impossible challenge to his subject for his doctoral research in the "Technical Electronics" department in Erlangen, but the technological scene was changing rapidly, and the challenge of transmission over the digital network technology for integrated services was quickly overcome thanks to other possibilities.
A small team in Erlangen decided to define the next generation of sound for radio and television, in a project funded mainly by the European Union project "Ourika".
"It was totally new for this whole region, as we hadn't built any of these technologies before," says Bernard Grill - who worked and studied alongside Brandenburg -.
"Just as we had no experience with radio technology, we were starting from scratch."
Competitors
The lack of prior knowledge was not the only challenge for the team of researchers, as there were a lot of competitors in the business world as well.
"We were researchers, and our competitors took good advantage of this," Gril recalled. "They made us appear as if we were dreaming about things that would be impossible to implement in practice, and that no sane person would take care of them."
MBEG could not agree on one procedure, which necessitated the unification of 3 different ways of playing audio and music over the Internet and through digital radio.
Brandenburg continued to review his work, and repeatedly made adjustments to the compression process so that it sounded as normal as "MP3 files".
All the exhausting work - by Brandenburg and his fellow researchers - not only renewed the radio, but revolutionized the entire music industry.
Erlangen researchers put a "reference programmer" on the Internet to review the capabilities of "MP3 3", and the programming used to play the tracks for only one minute of music, but one of the students managed to exceed this limit in the operating time and uploaded the hacked version of the program to the Internet, The result was a wave of "MP3" that culminated for the first time on the "Napster" platform for music services.
Then the wave that ends with "Dot MP3" قلب turned the music industry upside down.
And it was possible overnight to share music over the Internet all over the world, even if the data transmission moved very slowly compared to today.
And it took some time for the industry to recover from the incident of transferring Napster music via "MP3" files without permission, and it only recovered in 2003 through the iTunes Music Store and legal streaming services like Spotify (Spotify) in 2008.
Despite repeated compression improvements, the MP3 files and their successors came under constant criticism.
Canadian musician Neel Young said that the protesters were saying that the MP3 files were just a poorer version than the traditional music storage methods of (CDs and cassettes).