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How the NHL inadvertently helped create the music piracy crisis | Globalnews.ca
When the Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks faced off on Jan. 20, 1995, no one knew the future of music was about to change. It was the start of the music piracy crisis.
Other codecs couldn’t shrink files as much, but the mathematics of the competing algorithms were less complex, didn’t require as much computing power (hey, this was the ’80s and ’90s), and sounded as good as MPEG-3s in their shrunken state. The Fraunhofer crew experimented with compressing many different genres of music, recordings of people talking fast and those who spoke with accents, bird calls, crowd noise, jet engines and, curiously, the sounds of a hockey game. Bernard Grill, a computer programmer on the team, had determined that the sounds of a hockey game — the crowd, skates scraping the ice, pucks booming off the boards and so on — were very hard to compress with accuracy and without audible glitches.
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