When I moved to Linköping and connected to the vast Internet in 1997, MP3s was just in the rise. Sure, I've seen (heard) MP3s before, but being connected with 10MBit/s made it possible to actually send and receive them. At the same time computers became sufficiently fast so that you could play MP3 files without everything else coming to an complete stop, and hard drives so big that you could actually have a few albums stored. It was in these days that I begun searching for good software to handle my files. One of the more unusual programs I found was MP3Ext, an MS Windows extension that allowed me to know more about an MP3 file by just right click it. It used some home-made technology called ID3 to store some extra information in the file.

The program, written by a German named Michael Mutschler, was also translated into several other languages, and on his web site Michael asked for contributions. I thought that contributing with a Swedish translation was the least I could do, so I created a new locale file and sent it to him. I don't exactly remember why, but by some reason we begun mailing each other discussing how the ID3 format and its limitations. The mails became longer and I begun collecting our findings into a text file and called it ID3v2, riding on the hype of IPv6 (Where did it go? Both IPv6 and the hype?). After some considerable amount of work, with the help of Johan Sundström and Andreas Sigfridsson, I had made a first draft of the ID3v2 "standard" and published on the net (on this server actually, www.lysator.liu.se/id3v2) and begun getting attention.

One of the guys mailing me was Michael Robertson, owner of ZCompany. ZCompany owned a lot of different sites that today perhaps would be called portals. The biggest of them was www.filez.com, where one could find a lot of different programs, but one of the biggest comers where www.mp3.com, which specialized in mp3 files. When, in June 1998, Michael and mp3.com where to hold the "first annual mp3 summit" in San Diego, he invited me in as a speaker, which I accepted. Since Michael offered his guest room for me to sleep in I decided to spend a whole week there, a few days before and a few days after the summit. During the summit I released the first official unofficial version of the ID3v2 standard, available on the conference CD, for those who attended.

Now, several years and mp3 summits later I finally see the light in the tunnel (although it is not a really dark tunnel). The goal with ID3v2 has always been that it should be a proper RFC, and now it has the quality needed, in my opinion.