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 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 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 Fraun ...
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 and
WinPlay3, which were the first MP3 encoder and player for personal computers, respectively. He worked closely 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 Fraun ...
in their development. This work was chronicled in the book "
How Music Got Free".
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
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