Because my daughter can only fit 550 or so on hers, and it was supposed to be more (1000 I think?). I was thinking it was like a digital camera where better quality would use up more space, but she says she hasn’t done anything to increase the quality – she just loaded the songs on there at the default level. All of her friends have 800 or more on theirs.
I feel like a moron asking this, BTW – I know less than nothing about iPods – I have never even picked hers up and looked closely at it. But she wanted me to ask.
You’re right that there are different options for recording quality that affect how much space the music takes up, and of course longer songs take more space as well. From the Apple website: Song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding.
Mine is a 6gig one (sounds like your daughters might be 4gig) and I have somewhere between 900 and 1100 songs on it usually (supposed to hold about 1500, but I have a number of longer tracks on there)
It does sound like a recording quality/format issue - mine all pretty much live up to Apple’s capacity standards that borschevsky posted.
Most likely it’s a quality thing. Check the default quality she’s encoding/downloading at.
Significantly less likely is a problem that I’ve personally run in to. What kind of music does she listen to? Is it different from her friends? I’ve found that despite having similar numbers of songs, I have used much less space on my MP3 player in comparison to some of my friends. The reason? They listen to mainly electronica, where the average song (in my entirely non-professional assessment) is somewhere in the area of 7 minutes. I personally dabble in punk and oldies, where a long song is 4 minutes. Obviously a 7 minute Tiesto song takes much more space than a 2 minute Ramones song.
Based on the average size of my playlists, I could fit a little over 1000 songs onto a 4gig iPod.
Most likely it’s a quality thing. Check the default quality she’s encoding/downloading at.
Significantly less likely is a problem that I’ve personally run in to. What kind of music does she listen to? Is it different from her friends? I’ve found that despite having similar numbers of songs, I have used much less space on my MP3 player in comparison to some of my friends. The reason? They listen to mainly electronica, where the average song (in my entirely non-professional assessment) is somewhere in the area of 7 minutes. I personally dabble in punk and oldies, where a long song is 4 minutes. Obviously a 7 minute Tiesto song takes much more space than a 2 minute Ramones song.
Based on the average size of my playlists, I could fit a little over 1000 songs onto a 4gig iPod.
I have around 735 songs on my 4gb and I have 400mb left.
As has been previously posted, one thing you might want to examine is how she’s importing her CDs. If she’s using Apple Lossless, it’s going to use up more space than if she uses the regular import encoder (AAC). She did say she’s using the default, though, which I assume is AAC, so song length might be an issue. But I have quite a few lengthy jams and orchestral pieces on mine, though, and I still have 700+ and 400mb to spare.
How do you check the quality that the songs are recorded to? And, assuming that that is the problem (that the songs are recorded at too high a quality, how do you change it?
In iTunes (for Windows), you can right-click on a song and choose Get Info from the popup menu. That will show you the size of the file, the type of encoding, etc. The encoding that Apple uses for their capacity estimates takes up 1MB for 1 minute of music, so you could just compare the file size and song length.
You can check the iTunes import settings by clicking on the Preferences item on the Edit menu. On the Preferences screen, click the Advanced tab and then the Importing tab. This will show the encoder and quality settings. If you modify the import settings, you can then select the songs you want to re-encode and then click the Convert to AAC item on the Advanced menu.