iPod touch "Double" Your Storage: ShrinkMyTunes?

[triela]

So this $40 (£20) Windows-only program apparently converts mp3 files to about half their size, with a "minimal" or even "unnoticeable" (so they claim) loss in quality. Anyone want to give it a try and report? I suppose you could claim to have a "quasi-32GB" touch?

ShrinkMyTunes Website:
http://www.shrinkmytunes.com/en_gb/

WIRED Article:
http://www.wired.com/software/softwarereviews/news/2007/09/shrinkmytunes

Product Review:
http://www.playerbites.com/130/z-groups-shrinkmytunes-compression-software-review.html

 

[J@ffa]

Rubbish. They're clearly drastically transcoding and relying on the fact that people won't notice the difference. Sure, you won't if you use crappy earphones on your iPod, but play the music on even a half-decent pair of in-ear headphones or some external speakers and you will quickly notice the horrid compression. Don't do it! Just use LAME encoding. You save space, but not at the expense of quality.

 

[solyd]

Rubbish. They're clearly drastically transcoding and relying on the fact that people won't notice the difference. Sure, you won't if you use crappy earphones on your iPod, but play the music on even a half-decent pair of in-ear headphones or some external speakers and you will quickly notice the horrid compression. Don't do it! Just use LAME encoding. You save space, but not at the expense of quality.

Very true. But it also seems that they probably remove whitespace at the beginning and end of songs to reduce the size of each song. So some people might find this helpful.

 

[triela]

Yes, this product is clearly not intended for anyone who even knows what the word "audiophile" means. I was thinking that the type of person that actually uses the "in-box" iPod standard headphones and/or is perfectly happy with 128bit encoding might actually consider the output "good enough" simply to get more use out of their storage space.

 

[iShak]

seriously if you reduce the bit rate of the songs then you might be able to carry your complete music library around but you will definitely be carrying *less* of your the actual 'music' you originally had due to those truncated bits ..

so its not really as good as it sounds ..

I would never downgrade my music, I would rather carry selected songs and albums and rotate them using smart playlist syncs ...

 

[mkrishnan]

Very true. But it also seems that they probably remove whitespace at the beginning and end of songs to reduce the size of each song. So some people might find this helpful.

How much space is that really going to save?

Anyway, though, FWIW, I wouldn't totally dismiss Wired's review. They seem to have applied the appropriate skepticism and still walked away moderately impressed. When Rosetta was announced, no one believed that you could do processor emulation at those kinds of speeds. And yet here we have Rosetta. This sounds again like something I would not believe would happen, but perhaps it can actually do some things.

I would note however that Wired specifically discussed MP3s and not AACs (or WMAs for that matter). We also already know that MP3 is not the most efficient format. AACs at 128 already sound fairly close to MP3s at 192 -- which itself is a 30% size reduction. Some of the better WM codecs have similar capabilities. So really, we're talking here about going from a believable 30% size reduction to a 50% one.