Bernhard Grill (born January 5, 1961) is one of the developers of the

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

technology. Grill was born in

Schwabach Schwabach () is a German city of about 40,000 inhabitants near Nuremberg in the centre of the region of Franconia in the north of Bavaria. The city is an autonomous administrative district (''kreisfreie Stadt''). Schwabach is also the name of th ...

and studied

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

at the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg. From 1988 to 1995 he engaged in the development and implementation of audio coding algorithms at the

Fraunhofer Institute The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...

for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen. In 1992 he received, together with Jürgen Herre and Ernst Eberlein, the "Joseph-von-Fraunhofer Award" for his contributions to the mp3 technology. In 2001, he received the

German Future Prize The German Future Prize award is considered one of the most prestigious conferred for science and innovation Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offer ...

jointly with

Karlheinz Brandenburg Karlheinz Brandenburg (born 20 June 1954) is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser (former Institutes Director of Fraunhofer IIS), Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp (all Fraunh ...

and

Harald Popp Harald Popp (born 30 September, 1956 in Erlangen) is a German electrical engineer. Together with Karlheinz Brandenburg, Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser (former Institutes Director of Fraunhofer IIS), Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre (all Fraunhofer ...

for their role as inventors of the mp3 compression format. Grill was the original author of

L3enc 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 commandline tool was shareware and limited to 112 kbit/s. It w ...

and

WinPlay3 WinPlay3 was the first real-time MP3 audio player for PCs running Windows, both 16-bit (Windows 3.1) and 32-bit (Windows 95). Prior to this, audio compressed with MP3 had to be decompressed prior to listening. It was released by Fraunhofer IIS ...

, which were the first MP3 encoder and player for personal computers, respectively. He worked closely with

in their development. This work was chronicled in the book "

How Music Got Free ''How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy'' (Also published as ''How Music Got Free: What Happens When an Entire Generation Commits the Same Crime?'', ''How Music Got Free: The Inventor, ...

External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/20071226191959/http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/EN/bf/amm/mp3history/mp3teame.jsp 1961 births Living people German electrical engineers People from Schwabach Engineers from Bavaria {{Germany-music-bio-stub