The Development Of Technology based Music 6 Distribution formats

During the 1930s and 40s the German companies AEG and I. G. Farben improved the tape recorder and its coated-plastic recording medium to the point where it could approach the best disc recorders in sound quality. German Magnetophontape recorders were then copied and improved upon by American companies Ampex and Emi during the late forties, and when singer Bing Crosby presented the Ampex 200 reel to reel tape recorder to Les Paul in 1948, the development of modern multitrack recording began. Guitarist, Les Paul was a great innovator and his creative use of additional play and record heads on tape recorders facilitated the ability to record multiple tracks. Thus, stereo recording and overdubbing were born.

VINYL
The creative possibilities of tape, along with its editability, made it the preferred recording medium in the music industry until the 1990s. At the consumer end of the recording chain, however, tape was less successful. Record companies were willing to sell recorded tapes, but they could not compete in price with records, especially the LP record introduced in 1948 by CBS. So, while tape recorders were used in studios most domestic playback devices were gramophones and the public consumed recorded music in the form of vinyl discs. Tape recording had made stereo recording possible since the 30s, but it was not until RCA introduced the stereo LP in 1957-58 that moderately priced stereo phonographs became available, and even then, as many people still owned monophonic gramophones record companies tended to issue releases in both mono and stereo until the 60s.

TAPE
In the late 60s and 70s a new development in tape based media took a large share of the market in recorded music. The 8-track cartridge which was originally designed to be played in cars, consisted of a loop of tape contained within a plastic cartridge. Another tape format, the Compact Cassette was been introduced by Phillips in 1962. Initially, compact cassette sound quality was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape and kept improving. Cassette went on to become a popular (and re-recordable) alternative to the 12 inch vinyl LP during the late 1970s. The format spawned an ever-wider variety of portable and home recorders and players and in 1977-8 the Sony Corporation introduced its Walkman line of battery operated radios and tape players. Copycats jumped into the market the next year, and soon there was a bewildering variety of personal audio products.

The Development Of Technology based Music 6 Distribution formats

Cassette became the technology of choice for those interested in making copies of records for use in battery operated portables or in-car tape players. In terms of pre-recorded cassettes, sales overtook 8-tracks in the mid-1970s, then overtook LPs in the early 1980s. For a time in the 1980s, the cassette was the most popular home music format for both home recording and pre-recorded listening applications.

COMPACT DISC
Digital audio began in the telephone industry, where it was used to digitize telephone conversations but the compact disc developed as a spin-off of work at Phillips and Sony on ways to record TV signals with a laser onto a reflective disc. Some of the features of video recording are applicable to digital audio recording, so it was not a great leap from the early, analog laser videodiscs introduced in 1978 to the compact audio disc, introduced in 1982-3. The CD was not an immediate hit, and it took nearly a decade for it to displace the audio cassette, but in the 1990s it became the most popular home format. Recordable CDs were not generally available until the mid1990s, and few were sold before about 2000, when their sales took off. There were numerous variations of the CD and digital tape during the 1990s, few of which survived the decade. Today, the CD is being challenged by the DVD (which is also used for video), but it is unclear whether either of these formats will survive the challenge of media-free audio technologies such as MP3.

MP3
A specific type of MPEG encoding known formally as MPEG audio layer 3. MP3 uses perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information (more specifically, the redundant and irrelevant parts of a sound signal. The stuff the human ear usually doesn't hear anyway). The result in real terms is MP3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD (with a data rate of 1411.2 kilobits per one second of stereo music) by a factor of 12 (down to 112-128kbps) without sacrificing very much sound quality. Proponents of MP3 actually claim there is no sacrifice in sound quality, but audio professionals can usually hear the difference on good equipment. Sound quality is very subjective so each individual's level of satisfaction with the quality of MP3 encoded recordings is unique. Nevertheless these small files are very easy to transport across the Internet and other mediums that can't handle huge audio files. MP3 players have become very popular as well. Due to the convenience and relatively high quality of MP3 files the format has emerged as a standard in the Internet community. The small size of MP3 files enabled widespread peer-to-peer file sharing of music ripped from CDs, which would have previously been nearly impossible. The first large peer-to-peer filesharing network, Napster, was launched in 1999.