(Newswire.net — August 14, 2015) — Belgrade, Serbia – Many people worldwide are using mp3 audio decoders, which compress and decompress audio, creditable for storing and playing audio archives on our digital devices. However, very few people know that the first mp3 decoder allegedly was created by IT geeks from Novi Sad, a small city about 50 miles west of the Serbian capital Belgrade, CNN affiliate from Serbia, N1, reported.
The group of students from Novi Sad’s Faculty of Technology, gathered in 1993, in their friend’s basement, to construct an algorithm that is now the basic codec for audio compression. In those turbulent years in a country torn apart by war and devastating sanctions, under constant electricity restrictions, a group of young enthusiast developed the first mp3 decoder.
“From where we stand now, the enterprise seems impossible. However, back then, it didn’t look so intimidating,” Zeljko Lukac, one of the mp3 codec creators, told N1, adding it was the way they coped with the stress. “In a way, it was like pressure valve for letting out steam,” he said.
After releasing the mp3 decoder, engineers from Serbia could choose the country where they wish to continue their work. However, they chose to stay in Serbia and built an IT company that now employs 650 people.
“Here is my family, friends and an excellent university, so I didn’t find any reason for leaving the country,” said Jelena Kovacevic. “I see it as ideal – to live and work in country you are born, with your ‘crew,’ Parents and friends, and at the same time to have ability to travel to any part of the world,” she explained.
In a deeply troubled country such as Serbia, ‘good news’ hardly ever reaches the media, so no one realized that the revolutionary audio codec was created in the neighborhood.
“It is not that odd that in the 90’s no one heard of us,” Lukac told N1, adding that even today, information of success, like their, suffered lack of interest in media.
“Recently, our young mathematicians returned with medals from the Math Olympics, and hardly any news agency reported their success,” Lukac stressed.
Due to the excellent cooperation with the Faculty of Technology in Novi Sad, now there are almost no unemployed IT engineers in Serbia, and the creators of the mp3 decoder continue to work through international IT clusters worldwide.
In the ‘history’ segment at Wikipedia, there is no information about the IT engineers from Serbia that developed the first Mp3 decoder in 1993. According to Wikipedia, a German audio engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg used a CD recording of Suzanne Vega’s song “Tom’s Diner” to assess and refine the MP3 compression algorithm. In 1993, Brandenburg became head of the Audio/Multimedia department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, Germany, the official Mp3 algorithm developer.