Apple says their 20gb iPod will hold ‘5,000 songs’. I assume this is at the lowest quality level. How many songs will it hold using Apple Lossless encoding? (Assume an average run-time per song of 3:30, if you like.)
No, that’s not at the lowest quality. The 5,000 songs number is based on using 128Kbps AAC format — the same format and quality level the iTunes music store uses for the music it sells.
Apple Lossless encoder “offers sound quality indistinguishable from the original CDs at about half the file size of the original.”
If I recall correctly a lossless song is about 30-40 megabytes. Lets say 35 megs.
so 20 x 10^9 / 35 x 10^6 = 571.429 songs.
Keep in mind that this will force the ipod to spin up twice per song(32 meg memory) drastically cutting battery life.
I have a couple of CDs ripped as Apple Lossless and it works out to an average of 6-7MB per minute
I have 137 songs downloaded from the itunes site for a total of 685.1MB of space. That works out to 2.81Mb/song. My mini (5GB) has a mixure of ACC and MP3’s and a couple of audio books (like “When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops?” :rolleyes: ) for a total of 1631 entries of 4.02GB.
You can easily get 5000 ACC formatted tunes onto a 20GB ipod but I have no idea when you would have time to listen to all that music. :dubious:
The songs from iTunes music store are encoded at 128bps AAC (lossy). Apple Lostless encoding is much higher bps
iTunes music is encoded at 128Kbps, not 128bps.
I guess the next question should be how much the quality differs between AAC and Lossless.
Depends mostly on how high you set the bitrate.
You can set the bitrate between 16kbps and 320kbps when importing AAC. At 320kbps you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between that and Lossless.
I say “probably” because this depends on the quality of your equipment and how picky (for want of a better word) you are over the quality. It’s a very subjective thing.
The best thing to do is to import some CDs at a selection of bitrates (start at, say 128kbps, then move up to 320kbps with a few intervals in between) and also import some as Lossless.
Listen and see at which bitrate you can tell the difference between the AAC file and the Lossless. If you can’t tell the difference between a Lossless track and an AAC track encoded at 320kbps (or lower), then there’s obviously no point encoding all your music in Lossless.
For comparison a 5-minute song encoded at 320kbps is just under 12 megabytes, which is significantly smaller than the 40-50 megabytes the same song in Apple Lossless would take up.
Oops! Thanks for the correction
preview is my friend
If you want to use 3:30 as the average song length, then about 1,300 songs.
(CD audio takes up about 8.75 MB per min. A 3.5 min song would be 30.625 MB. Apple Lossless roughly halves the filesize, leaving us with 15.3125 MB per song. 20 GB divided by that is about 1,306.)
No iPod yet, but I did rip some CDs onto iTunes. It’s hard to tell the quality with the little speakers on my PowerBook; but from what I can hear, it sounds good. I put 15 or 16 CDs into iTunes, and it took less than 700mb.
Reply: I haven’t counted my CDs recently, but I think I have about 200 or so. It sounds as if an iPod might hold almost half of them at Lossless size; but I’ve discovered that it’s a bit of a pain typing in all of those titles, and it takes a few minutes per CD to transfer them at the lower rate.
Dude,
Consider ripping them at the highest quality and then making playlist of the songs that you really want on your portable device. Keep the full versions on your harddisk and download new playlist with the whole CD as needed.
I’ve got tons of crap on mine that I never listen to. Wish I had ripped them at the higher quality to begin with. Now I got to go back and redo my 200 CD’s over again. 
Unfortunately, iTunes didn’t come with a manual. I tried using the Help button, but it wasn’t very helpful. So I don’t know how to change the encoding. I’m just putting the CDs in the slot, making a ‘playlist’ (i.e., a file with the name of the band), typing the names of the songs, and moving them into the playlist. I have no idea which encoding setting it’s using.
I beleive that you have to go to the “Advanced” setting to change the bit rate.
Weird, you have to type in the titles? Doesn’t iTunes support CDDB?
Yes it does. Like LA implied, the iTunes help is crap. I only found it out after playing with it. After my 10th CD I was amazed that it filled in the songs for me. And Apple claims to be so user friendly . . .
Checkout http://www.ipodlounge.com/ lot’s of good info there. 
From the Apple site: (Purchased songs are encoded using a protected AAC format that prevents them from being converted.).
That kind of ticks me off. You can do it, but you have to go outside of Apple to do so.
I wish satillite radio (truely) worked in doors. :rolleyes:
Well, you want to specify what bitrate preferences to use when importing music, right? So look at Preferences >> Importing.
Seems fairly obvious to me. 