If you know me, you know I have an iPod, and I'm absolutely nuts about it. I have a 30GB iPod that I purchased on May 5th, 2003 and that I now have 4952 songs on it. For someone with over 3000 CDs and an additional 3000 vinyl records, that's a small amount. I am very selective about the stuff I put on my iPod, and I frequently add and remove songs. The songs that stay are ones that I like or for one reason or another I have to keep, for example songs I have to learn for the band I'm in (Monkey Call).
However, I'd like to type a bit about maximizing your iPod experience. Besides being selective about the songs you put on your iPod, I have a full 10 gigabytes free on mine. I'm only supposed to have approximately 7500 songs space on my machine. Ultimately, I'll have a lot more. The reason? Old songs in mono and spoken word selections.
AAC compression uses less file space than MP3, and if you have a CD with old songs in mono (say for example, the first 4 Beatle albums), if you use the default setting for importing the music from CD, you'll import those mono files as full stereo. For the mono files ONLY, change your importing preferences to custom and mono, and those mono files will save with half the space and identical fidelity. As a result, my iPod has stuff by The Beatles, The Kinks, James Brown, Dead Kennedys, Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, and many more that are mono songs, but play wonderfully with no loss in sound quality, yet they only use half the space.
Next, if you have spoken word material, the quality of the file is not as critical as those music files. Therefore, keep 'em in mono and change the bit rate to 48kbps. As a result, a four minute file, which usually takes up four megabytes of space, will only consume 1.5 megabytes. Even if you only have a couple of hours of spoken word stuff on your iPod this will free up a lot of space for full stereo 128kbps files.
Coming up tomorrow: my review of "Kill Bill Volume 2".
However, I'd like to type a bit about maximizing your iPod experience. Besides being selective about the songs you put on your iPod, I have a full 10 gigabytes free on mine. I'm only supposed to have approximately 7500 songs space on my machine. Ultimately, I'll have a lot more. The reason? Old songs in mono and spoken word selections.
AAC compression uses less file space than MP3, and if you have a CD with old songs in mono (say for example, the first 4 Beatle albums), if you use the default setting for importing the music from CD, you'll import those mono files as full stereo. For the mono files ONLY, change your importing preferences to custom and mono, and those mono files will save with half the space and identical fidelity. As a result, my iPod has stuff by The Beatles, The Kinks, James Brown, Dead Kennedys, Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, and many more that are mono songs, but play wonderfully with no loss in sound quality, yet they only use half the space.
Next, if you have spoken word material, the quality of the file is not as critical as those music files. Therefore, keep 'em in mono and change the bit rate to 48kbps. As a result, a four minute file, which usually takes up four megabytes of space, will only consume 1.5 megabytes. Even if you only have a couple of hours of spoken word stuff on your iPod this will free up a lot of space for full stereo 128kbps files.
Coming up tomorrow: my review of "Kill Bill Volume 2".
posted by Bill @ 11:29 PM
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