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Juergen Herre, chief scientist at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits and professor at Erlangen University in Germany, discusses the development of the MP3 audio format (technically called MPEG-1 Layer 3), how lossy audio codecs work using psychoacoustics, how higher bitrates yield higher audio quality, constant versus variable bitrates, more recent audio codecs such as MPEG-2 AAC and surround MP3, 3D audio, object-oriented audio, answers to chat-room questions, and more.

Run Time: 1:02:14

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Juergen Herre joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in Erlangen, Germany, in 1989. Since then, he has been involved in the development of perceptual coding algorithms for high quality audio, including the well-known ISO/MPEG-Audio Layer III coder (aka "MP3"). In 1995, Dr. Herre joined Bell Laboratories for a post-doc term working on the development of MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). By the end of 1996, he went back to Fraunhofer to work on the development of more advanced multimedia technology including MPEG-4, MPEG-7, and MPEG-D, currently as the Chief Executive Scientist for the Audio/Multimedia activities at Fraunhofer IIS, Erlangen. In September 2011, Dr. Herre was appointed full professor at the University of Erlangen and the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen.

Dr. Herre is a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, co-chair of the AES Technical Committee on Coding of Audio Signals, and vice chair of the AES Technical Council. He is a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing, served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, and is an active member of the MPEG audio subgroup.

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