iPod iPod: A thousand songs in your pocket. and now...?

[Turnpike]

Just watched the "thousand songs in your pocket" commercial from the release of the original iPod, today is the 15th anniversary or close to it. I didn't know about Apple much back then, having discovered and switched over to Apple things around the iPhone 4 era. So the commercial was both fun and a first to me.

So with the iPhone 7 and 128GB of memory, is there a quick way to calculate how many songs can be in your pocket now...? 128 divided by whatever the average song takes up...? Figuring downloadable music only, not factoring in wifi, cellular, and Apple music or other streaming services, of course.

 

[keysofanxiety]

Hmm, that's a pretty good question actually. Saying 1000 songs in your pocket would come to about 5MB per song.

If we liberally double that to 10MB per song in 2016 and say there's 110GB of free memory to account for OS/apps/games, then we're talking about 11,000 songs. Just shows how far we've come!

My maths is pretty shoddy by the way, so if I've missed the boat, feel free to correct me.

 

[Jessica Lares]

You're not far off @keysofanxiety. I'm still seeing some in the ~8 MB on 2016 releases, but mostly on tracks shorter than 4 minutes.

 

[Pakaku]

It depends on the file size per song, which depends on things like length and quality. Apple would base their number on the kind of music they sell through the store, which will probably not be lossless or anything spectacular, especially back when the first ipod was new.

I'm slowly transitioning all of my music to lossless if possible, I have about 21.9GB of music on my iPhone, but only 1800 songs. So that's about 12MB on average. If I had 128GB to dedicate to music, I could probably hold about 10500 songs.

 

[McScooby]

If we liberally double that to 10MB per song in 2016 and say there's 110GB of free memory to account for OS/apps/games, then we're talking about 11,000 songs. Just shows how far we've come!

Not far enough! Let's get back to we've doubled the storage & kept price the same / taken $100 off, like what it used to be when new models were released!

 

[sofila]

given that iTunes offers the chance to convert to 128 kbs aac all files in your library, if you want to do the math I can say you that one of my iPods (being this 3rd gen 64Gb I use in my car) has 13,376 music files on it for 54,3 Gb space occupied. Consider not only 3 minutes songs, I'd say iPhone 128 Gb could easily give room for 27,000 songs at least

 

[darngooddesign]

You're not far off @keysofanxiety. I'm still seeing some in the ~8 MB on 2016 releases, but mostly on tracks shorter than 4 minutes.

When the iPod first came out i think they based toe 1000 songs on 128k MP3s, while today our files are higher res.

 

[Shirasaki]

I only have 1536 songs on device, which takes up 40GB storage. Almost all of them are lossless or even hires songs.

 

[Jessica Lares]

When the iPod first came out i think they based toe 1000 songs on 128k MP3s, while today our files are higher res.

Even better, 160!

https://web.archive.org/web/20020124043537/http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html

Capacity based on an average song length of 4 minutes and 160-Kbps encoding.

Gotta love how Archive.org even has the old specification PDFs.

https://web.archive.org/web/2001112...9433fbf7/www.apple.com/ipod/pdf/iPod_DS-a.pdf