iPod capacity

[michael666]

After several weeks of constant CD-ripping, I managed to fill my new 30GB (actually 27.9GB) iPod. According to Apple's marketing, it should store about 7500 songs. In fact, it now stores exactly 6460 songs, so maybe the music I like is "longer" than the average (or longer than the music Apple's marketing listens to).

I'm just wondering how much songs other people have stored on their iPods.

[LethalWolfe]

Originally posted by michael666
After several weeks of constant CD-ripping, I managed to fill my new 30GB (actually 27.9GB) iPod. According to Apple's marketing, it should store about 7500 songs. In fact, it now stores exactly 6460 songs, so maybe the music I like is "longer" than the average (or longer than the music Apple's marketing listens to).

I'm just wondering how much songs other people have stored on their iPods.

Did you encode at a higher bit rate then the default settings? Currently I have about 23gigs worth of music, but I use much higher settings than the default 128 bit rate MP3/ACC settings.


Lethal

[JPGR_Fan]

I have 7634 songs on my 30 GB, with 1 GB empty. Used 128 AAC for 98%.

[Westside guy]

michael666,

I take it this the first time you've ever noticed that hard drive makers use the "standard" 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes? This has been how hard drives have been marketed since they crossed the 1 megabyte boundary. So yeah, "30GB" is really a bit less than 28GB. It is rather misleading, but it is how it's done by all vendors across the board.

My "60GB" hard drive is, in truth, more like 55GB plus change. And my "20GB" iPod is more like 18.59GB. :)

[Kwyjibo]

yeah the encode level matters on how many songs. one of my friends has quite a few standup mp3's that are like 20minutes long , things like that might throw off the balance

[michael666]

Yes, I forgot to mention. 99% of my music is encoded at 128Kb/s AAC, the standard iTunes setting. The rest is 128Kb/s MP3.

[virividox]

apple probably set the standard song to be 3.5 min 128 aac. dunno what that turns out to be in size, but i encode at 192 aac, and theres no way ill fit 7500 songs, that being said, i think that 7500 is probably the ave number if all ur settings are the same and ur songs are identical...which in the real world isnt

[sparks9]

I think the standard Apple song is 128kb/s, 4 mins. long.

[sparks9]

From Apple's website:
"1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.
Capacity based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding. "

[jtown]

Data storate isn't something many can quantify directly. There's no direct relation between physical size and storage capacity. You can't look at a hard drive and know how much data it can hold just by measuring its physical size. Could be anywhere from 1 gig to 250 gigs in the same form factor. You can hold a 30 gig ipod in the palm of your hand yet a big full-tower PC may only have a 20 gig drive. And even when you tell Joe Sixpacks that a device holds 30 gigabytes of data, they don't really understand what that means. They need a frame of reference that relates storage capacity to something they're familiar with. So PC manufacturers (and manufacturers of PC-related equipment) have to translate data storage capacity into something the general public can comprehend.

They know what song are. They can measure that after a fashion. 7500 songs. About 12 songs per CD = about 625 CDs. No-brainer. They do the same thing with hard drives. Read the retail boxes in the stores and you'll see how they say things like "holds XXXX songs, XX hours of video, etc."

Makes me think of the time a client emailed me a >400 meg database. "Oh. Is that big?" I guess she didn't notice that it took all afternoon to send a single message. :rolleyes: