Bottom Of The Barrel

How many songs can it hold?

Can a 2GB iPod Nano hold 500 songs? How about a 4GB SanDisk Sansa player holding 64 hours of music? Neither of these statements are true or at least they need an asterisk or footnote to qualify the statements. Here is the straight dope, MP3 players are portable storage devices that have some finite capacity to store data files. They can hold X amount of data [where X = the storage capacity like 2 or 4 GB].

The iPod Nano has the following statement when referring to storage capacity:

Song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; actual capacity varies by content.

This brings up an interesting question, how long are your songs? Well that depends I guess on what you listen to. For example, if your a fan of Green Day's Dookie album you would find 14 tracks with a total running time of 39:46. Average song length: 2:49. Now if you happen to be a fan of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album you would have 8 tracks with a total running time of 42:25. Average song length: 5:18. Almost twice as long! If my MP3's were all twice as long as yours, we would have a much different number of songs that we could store on the identical device - because it's all about storage capacity.

The SanDisk Sansa player has the following statement regarding storage capacity:

4GB of memory plays back over 64 hours of MP3 (128 hours of WMA) music (over 960 MP3/1920 WMA songs)* - based on 128Kbps playback.

This brings up the other major factor is hours of storage, sound quality. When a CD track is ripped into a MP3 file, it has to be encoded at a specific quality or bitrate [or more specifically Kilobits per second - Kbps]. The typical rage of bitrate is from 128 Kbps [PC near CD quality] to 320 Kbps [HI-FI near CD quality]. Each bitrate has it's own "compression" ratio, for example 128 Kbps is 1:11 while 256 Kbps is only 1:5 so if you were to take a full CD [700 MB] of music and rip to 128 Kbps you would end up with 63.7 MB of MP3 data however if you were to use a bitrate of 256 Kbps you would have 126 MB of data - again twice as much.

If you were to mix these two concepts in the worst case scenario, the Zeppelin 256 Kbps rip would be 4 times larger than the Green Day 128 Kpbs rip - even though the Zeppelin album is only 3 minutes longer.

So how many songs [or how many hours] can your MP3 player hold? Exactly, it can store as much music as can fit into it's flash drive until it's capacity is completely utilized.

Labels: MP3, Technology

posted by TheWino @ 8:45 AM