My iPod holds much less than supposed to..

[JJMc]

For a while now, I've been buying/fixing/selling iPods, mostly just for a hobby, I don't make too much. Anyway, I mostly do the 1st generation Nanos. I fixed a couple of things on a 1 GB and went to sync test it. I only had about 30 songs in my iTunes library, so I just hit "sync whole library" without thinking a thing of it. Come to find out that the 30 or so songs totaled 1.04 GB. Now, Apple touts this model as being able to hold around 240. A lot of the songs are 4-5 minutes long, but they shouldn't take up THAT much room, right? I can see maybe only being able to fit 200 instead of 240, but 30? That's way off.

 

Never had this problem before. Is it possible that these songs are in some super high-quality format? I wouldn't think so, because again this is the first time this has happened.

[Steviekick]

What's the bitrate/quality of the files?

[Edwin MacPhisto]

Just check the file size on your computer. It sounds like they might be in some sort of lossless format. I think the "holds xxx songs!" qualification is generally based on 128kb files of 4 minutes or so in length. At 128kb encoding (AAC or MP3), you're looking at about 1 mb per minute of song.

[Youth N Asia]

My 8gb Ipod only started with 7.2 free gigs.

 

I've got over 1000 songs on mine and it's only half full

[Ravenbomb]

Yeah, some of the space is taken up by the programming for the iPod.

[AndrewTS]

It would be partially the iPod software and partially the formatted capacity vs. advertised capacity.

 

Advertised capacity is 1GB = 1 billion bytes.

 

Formatted capacity (what your computer reads) is 1GB = 1.07 billion bytes.

 

To see how much space you should have on a completely blank disk, divide advertised capacity by 1.07. So your iPod disk, sans software, would generally be about 7.47 GB

[tominator89]

Sounds like the files are probably FLAC as previously mentioned.