MP3 is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg, with support from other digital scientists in other countries. Originally defined as the third audio format of the MPEG-1 standard, it was retained and further extended — defining additional bit-rates and support for more audio channels — as the third audio format of the subsequent MPEG-2 standard. A third version, known as MPEG-2.5 — extended to better support lower bit rates — is commonly implemented, but is not a recognized standard.
Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Llama Group. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate.
WinDVD is a commercial video player and music player software for Microsoft Windows. It enables the viewing of DVD-Video movies on the user's PC. DVD-Video backups stored on hard disk can also be played. The player also can be used to play video and audio files in other formats encoded with different codecs, such as DivX, Xvid, Windows Media Video (video), MP3 and AAC (audio). WinDVD Pro 12 is the latest version with the most features and accommodations. However, competitors such as VLC have completely replaced WinDVD due to the lack of modern features WinDVD provides.
Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser, Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp, he developed the widespread MP3 method for audio data compression. He is also known for his elementary work in the field of audio coding, the perception measurement, the wave field synthesis and psychoacoustics. Brandenburg has received numerous national and international research awards, prizes and honors for his work. Since 2000 he has been a professor of electronic media technology at the Technical University Ilmenau. Brandenburg was significantly involved in the founding of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) and currently serves as its director.
A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs, but sometimes a loop. The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of television broadcasting, radio broadcasting and personal computers.
The following comparison of video players compares general and technical information for notable software media player programs.
The Personal Jukebox was the first consumer hard drive-based digital audio player. Introduced in 1999, it preceded the Apple iPod, SanDisk Sansa, and other similar players. It was designed and developed by Compaq Research starting in May 1998. Compaq did not release the player themselves, but licensed the design to HanGo Electronics Co., Ltd. of South Korea.
MP3 Surround is an extension of MP3 for multi-channel audio support including 5.1 surround sound. It was developed by Fraunhofer IIS in collaboration with Thomson and Agere Systems, and released in December 2004.
M3U is a computer file format for a multimedia playlist. One common use of the M3U file format is creating a single-entry playlist file pointing to a stream on the Internet. The created file provides easy access to that stream and is often used in downloads from a website, for emailing, and for listening to Internet radio.
PLS is a computer file format for a multimedia playlist. It is typically used by media players for streaming media over the Internet, but may also be used for playing local media.
High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an audio coding format for lossy data compression of digital audio defined as an MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/IEC 14496–3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC (AAC-LC) optimized for low-bitrate applications such as streaming audio. The usage profile HE-AAC v1 uses spectral band replication (SBR) to enhance the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) compression efficiency in the frequency domain. The usage profile HE-AAC v2 couples SBR with Parametric Stereo (PS) to further enhance the compression efficiency of stereo signals.
Fraunhofer l3enc was the first public software able to encode pulse-code modulation (PCM) .wav files to the MP3 format. The first public version was released on July 13, 1994. This command-line tool was shareware and limited to 112 kbit/s. It was available for MS-DOS, Linux, Solaris, SunOS, NeXTstep and IRIX. A licence that allowed full use cost 350 Deutsche Mark, or about $250 (US).
K-Multimedia Player is an Adware-supported media player for Windows and iOS that can play most current audio and video formats, including VCD, HDML, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, AAC, WMA 7, 8, WMV, RealMedia, FLV and QuickTime. KMPlayer shows many advertisements, including in the homepage, side panels, options panel, and as pop-up ads.
Tomislav Uzelac is the Croatian programmer who wrote an amp MPEG audio decoder that is considered to be the first successful software MP3 player. Two students from the University of Utah, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev adapted the decoder to work on Windows and made it the MP3 decoding engine for the original version of Winamp.
The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play audio files, with limited or no support for video playback. Multi-media players designed for video playback, which can also play music, are included under comparison of video player software.
JetAudio is a shareware media player application for Microsoft Windows and Android released in 1997, that offers playback options for a wide range of multimedia file formats.
Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) is an audio compression format and codec for both music and speech or any mix of speech and audio using very low bit rates between 12 and 64 kbit/s. It was developed by Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and was published as an international standard ISO/IEC 23003-3 and also as an MPEG-4 Audio Object Type in ISO/IEC 14496-3:2009/Amd 3 in 2012.
Fraunhofer FDK AAC is an open-source library for encoding and decoding digital audio in the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. Fraunhofer IIS, developed this library for Android 4.1. It supports several Audio Object Types including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AAC LC, HE-AAC, HE-AACv2 as well AAC-LD and AAC-ELD for real-time communication. The encoding library supports sample rates up to 96 kHz and up to eight channels.
Harald Popp is a German electrical engineer. Together with Karlheinz Brandenburg, Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser, Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre, he developed the widespread MP3 method for audio data compression.
