Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? It's time for a tech Stuff tidbits. I'm going to answer the question what was the first MP three? Well, here's the too long, didn't listen answer. It was Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega. It's a song I personally do not like. That's not to say it's a bad song. Just because I don't like something doesn't mean it's bad. I just mean I personally do not find this song at all appealing. But it was, in fact the first MP three. Now, if you don't know Tom's Diner, it features Vega giving a little slice a life moment from the perspective of a man sitting in a diner who feels kind of distanced from the world around him. In case you need a reminder, here's the first verse of the song. I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner. I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee, and he fills it only halfway and before I even argue he is looking out the window at somebody coming in. Now that song doesn't work for me. I get that it got really popular, especially after someone did an unauthorized remix of it, which is the version most people know. But it turned out to be an absolute perfect song to test the MP three compression algorithm. To understand why, we need to learn about the purpose of the MP three compression algorithm in the first place. So in this case, the compression we're talking about is relating to file size. There's an interesting side note. There's a different kind of audio compression. This refers to the reduction of diner range in a recording, and by that I mean reducing the volume distance between the loudest and the softest parts of a recording. That can actually take a part in file compression as well, but that's we're going to set it aside. Just put a pin in that, take a look at it later on. But with file compression generally, the whole goal is to find ways to pack information into smaller file sizes. That makes those files easier to manage. That's important if you are dealing with a limited amount of storage, or maybe you want to send the file from one machine to another. And you've got limited bandwidth, so you need smaller file sizes, or else the process is going to take way too long. But how do you do it well? One approach to file compression is to take a real good look at the file you're trying to compress, and you ask the question, is all the information that is inside this file necessary? Or could I get rid of some of that information and still have a usable file on the other side of it With music. That means figuring out which bits of data you can drop without it having a noticeable effect on the audio quality. Ideally, the compressed file would be indistinguishable from the original raw audio, but since you're tossing out information, that's not necessarily a guarantee. This is what makes the MP three a loss e file format. MP three is just one example of a loss e file format. There are others, and the word loss e means just exactly what you think. It means that some information is tossed aside or lost in the process of compressing the file to a smaller size. The folks who worked on the MP three format had to figure out which information was most likely to have little to no impact on audio quality within an audio file. To do that, they had to take into account human psychology and the limitations of human hearing. So psychoacoustics played a big part in determining the MP three compression algorithm. So for example, by that, I mean, let's think of the range of human hearing in terms of frequencies for a second, So your typical human is able to hear frequencies as low as twenty hurts and as high as twenty thousand hurts or twenty killer hurts. Hurts in this case references an oscillation per second or a vibration per second, So twenty hurts means that something is effectively vibrating twenty times per second. So if you had a string that when you plucked, it would vibrate twenty times per second, that string is vibrating at twenty hurts. That would be a very very low note. The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch, and as we age we tend to lose the ability to hear some of those higher pitches, which is why you would hear about some convenience stores experimenting with playing very high pitched noises to discourage young punks who wanted to loiter in the joint. So human hearing has limitations, and in theory you can eliminate sounds that would fall outside of those limitations. If a sound file contains frequencies that are at twenty one killer hertz, but your typical person can't hear anything above twenty killer hertz, well, at least theoretically, you can just toss that information and it won't change anything. If a sound file contains a sound but no one has the capacity to hear it, does a tree fall in the forest. Might be getting a little lost in the woods here anyway. That frequency example, that's just one example of the sound that humans would have trouble hearing. So another is when we hear a very soft sound that immediately follows a very loud sound, we don't actually perceive the soft one. The loud sound we hear eclipses the soft sound, and it turns out we can't hear the soft one at all. So again, if we can't hear that soft sound that played immediately after a loud one, why would you keep it? You know, you might as well just get rid of that information. You can't hear it anyway, Just get rid of it. Save the space. This psychoacoustic approach to sound would lead the developers of the MP three format to create a strategy regarding what information to keep and what information to ditch. On top of that, the algorithm had sort of a sliding scale, so maybe you want to keep as much information as possible, so you select that when you create the MP three So you're losing less information in the process. You're still impressing the file, but not to the extent that you could if you chose. Maybe the most important thing to you is that you reduce the file size as much as you can, so you crank the compression up. Now, obviously the harder you go, the more likely you're going to lose information that will make a noticeable difference in the playback of the audio file, and you'll you would say, oh, the quality here is not as good as I thought it would be. This is where Tom's Diner comes in. Carl Heinz Brandenburg, who is one of the leads on creating the MP three format, used Tom's Diner to listen back to compressed files and determine how the compression was affecting the audio quality. So it was a great track to use because the actual qualities of the recording itself were such that it was easy to detect if something was not quite right. The original recording of Tom's Diner is not the one that has the catchy beat and the horns in it. It's a very simple a cappella recording of Suzanne Vegas singing her tale of looking at the world from a male perspective through a sense of distance and attachment. Branden Berg would use that track while tweaking the algorithm, trying to create the thin line between an effective data compression technique and a minimal impact on sound quality. And for her contributions to the effort, although she made them unknowingly, Brandenburg would name Suzanne Vega the mother of the mp three. Interestingly, Ryan maguire decided to take a sort of negative image of the compressed Tom's Diner. He identified sounds that were deleted in the process of creating a lossy version of Tom's Diner, and then it created a new recording that contained only the bits that had been cut from the file. And it's almost like listening to the ghost of a song. In fact, I think they called the project the Ghost of the MPIE three. It's pretty creepy stuff. It would not be out of place in a horror movie. The fact that lossy files by definition lose information in the process of data compression meant that audio files dismiss the MP three format is inherently inferior to others, at least as far as listening experiences go. And there are arguments that some of the lost information, while potentially being imperceptible within the song itself, help shape the overall sound and tone of the piece. So though you can't directly hear the stuff that's being cut, that stuff actually influences how you perceive other things, so you still change the experience of hearing the finished audio. But the MP three format created the opportunity to store and transfer audio files without having to deal with massive raw audio formats, and back in the day that was not a trivial thing. And so that is the answer to the question Tom's Diner the first MP three Hope you're all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? It's time for a tech Stuff tidbits. I'm going to answer the question what was the first MP three? Well, here's the too long, didn't listen answer. It was Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega. It's a song I personally do not like. That's not to say it's a bad song. Just because I don't like something doesn't mean it's bad. I just mean I personally do not find this song at all appealing. But it was, in fact the first MP three. Now, if you don't know Tom's Diner, it features Vega giving a little slice a life moment from the perspective of a man sitting in a diner who feels kind of distanced from the world around him. In case you need a reminder, here's the first verse of the song. I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner. I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee, and he fills it only halfway and before I even argue he is looking out the window at somebody coming in. Now that song doesn't work for me. I get that it got really popular, especially after someone did an unauthorized remix of it, which is the version most people know. But it turned out to be an absolute perfect song to test the MP three compression algorithm. To understand why, we need to learn about the purpose of the MP three compression algorithm in the first place. So in this case, the compression we're talking about is relating to file size. There's an interesting side note. There's a different kind of audio compression. This refers to the reduction of diner range in a recording, and by that I mean reducing the volume distance between the loudest and the softest parts of a recording. That can actually take a part in file compression as well, but that's we're going to set it aside. Just put a pin in that, take a look at it later on. But with file compression generally, the whole goal is to find ways to pack information into smaller file sizes. That makes those files easier to manage. That's important if you are dealing with a limited amount of storage, or maybe you want to send the file from one machine to another. And you've got limited bandwidth, so you need smaller file sizes, or else the process is going to take way too long. But how do you do it well? One approach to file compression is to take a real good look at the file you're trying to compress, and you ask the question, is all the information that is inside this file necessary? Or could I get rid of some of that information and still have a usable file on the other side of it With music. That means figuring out which bits of data you can drop without it having a noticeable effect on the audio quality. Ideally, the compressed file would be indistinguishable from the original raw audio, but since you're tossing out information, that's not necessarily a guarantee. This is what makes the MP three a loss e file format. MP three is just one example of a loss e file format. There are others, and the word loss e means just exactly what you think. It means that some information is tossed aside or lost in the process of compressing the file to a smaller size. The folks who worked on the MP three format had to figure out which information was most likely to have little to no impact on audio quality within an audio file. To do that, they had to take into account human psychology and the limitations of human hearing. So psychoacoustics played a big part in determining the MP three compression algorithm. So for example, by that, I mean, let's think of the range of human hearing in terms of frequencies for a second, So your typical human is able to hear frequencies as low as twenty hurts and as high as twenty thousand hurts or twenty killer hurts. Hurts in this case references an oscillation per second or a vibration per second, So twenty hurts means that something is effectively vibrating twenty times per second. So if you had a string that when you plucked, it would vibrate twenty times per second, that string is vibrating at twenty hurts. That would be a very very low note. The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch, and as we age we tend to lose the ability to hear some of those higher pitches, which is why you would hear about some convenience stores experimenting with playing very high pitched noises to discourage young punks who wanted to loiter in the joint. So human hearing has limitations, and in theory you can eliminate sounds that would fall outside of those limitations. If a sound file contains frequencies that are at twenty one killer hertz, but your typical person can't hear anything above twenty killer hertz, well, at least theoretically, you can just toss that information and it won't change anything. If a sound file contains a sound but no one has the capacity to hear it, does a tree fall in the forest. Might be getting a little lost in the woods here anyway. That frequency example, that's just one example of the sound that humans would have trouble hearing. So another is when we hear a very soft sound that immediately follows a very loud sound, we don't actually perceive the soft one. The loud sound we hear eclipses the soft sound, and it turns out we can't hear the soft one at all. So again, if we can't hear that soft sound that played immediately after a loud one, why would you keep it? You know, you might as well just get rid of that information. You can't hear it anyway, Just get rid of it. Save the space. This psychoacoustic approach to sound would lead the developers of the MP three format to create a strategy regarding what information to keep and what information to ditch. On top of that, the algorithm had sort of a sliding scale, so maybe you want to keep as much information as possible, so you select that when you create the MP three So you're losing less information in the process. You're still impressing the file, but not to the extent that you could if you chose. Maybe the most important thing to you is that you reduce the file size as much as you can, so you crank the compression up. Now, obviously the harder you go, the more likely you're going to lose information that will make a noticeable difference in the playback of the audio file, and you'll you would say, oh, the quality here is not as good as I thought it would be. This is where Tom's Diner comes in. Carl Heinz Brandenburg, who is one of the leads on creating the MP three format, used Tom's Diner to listen back to compressed files and determine how the compression was affecting the audio quality. So it was a great track to use because the actual qualities of the recording itself were such that it was easy to detect if something was not quite right. The original recording of Tom's Diner is not the one that has the catchy beat and the horns in it. It's a very simple a cappella recording of Suzanne Vegas singing her tale of looking at the world from a male perspective through a sense of distance and attachment. Branden Berg would use that track while tweaking the algorithm, trying to create the thin line between an effective data compression technique and a minimal impact on sound quality. And for her contributions to the effort, although she made them unknowingly, Brandenburg would name Suzanne Vega the mother of the mp three. Interestingly, Ryan maguire decided to take a sort of negative image of the compressed Tom's Diner. He identified sounds that were deleted in the process of creating a lossy version of Tom's Diner, and then it created a new recording that contained only the bits that had been cut from the file. And it's almost like listening to the ghost of a song. In fact, I think they called the project the Ghost of the MPIE three. It's pretty creepy stuff. It would not be out of place in a horror movie. The fact that lossy files by definition lose information in the process of data compression meant that audio files dismiss the MP three format is inherently inferior to others, at least as far as listening experiences go. And there are arguments that some of the lost information, while potentially being imperceptible within the song itself, help shape the overall sound and tone of the piece. So though you can't directly hear the stuff that's being cut, that stuff actually influences how you perceive other things, so you still change the experience of hearing the finished audio. But the MP three format created the opportunity to store and transfer audio files without having to deal with massive raw audio formats, and back in the day that was not a trivial thing. And so that is the answer to the question Tom's Diner the first MP three Hope you're all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.