Why iPod?

With all the wondrous devices to which Apple might have devoted its legendary creative power, why create yet another music player? To learn the answer to this question, you must look at a technology that has changed the way we use and share digital media: MP3.

The MP3 revolution

In 1987, a German company, Fraunhofer IIS-A, began working on a system for creating digital audio files that consumed little storage space while maintaining much of the original file's quality. Among other things, this work was motivated by the fact that one minute of CD-quality stereo music consumed about 10MB of storage space--storage space that at the time was very costly. The eventual result of this work was something called the MPEG Audio Layer-3 compression standard, now commonly known as MP3.

This standard uses perceptual coding techniques to eliminate audio data that the human ear is unlikely to discern. So efficient is MP3 encoding that you can use it to reduce an audio file's size by a factor of 12 yet maintain most of the sound quality of the original file. Thanks to MP3, a four-minute song that normally would devour 40MB of hard drive space now weighs in at less than 4MB.