ninikins

Roughly, how many tracks can various sizes of memory hold? i need to know what size memory would suit me best...

capitalist_junkie

I think it depends a lot on the sizes of the files you want to put on it. My iPod will not hold as many tracks if I uploaded my classical collection, which contains much longer pieces of music. Right now, my 4-gig mini holds slighly over 1,000 tracks of lengths between 2 and 8 minutes.

ninikins

Thanks very much for the info I was considering 4ig so now I know what to expect..they couldn't tell me much in the shop when I asked.

capitalist_junkie

I hate when that happens. I mean, I know they can't expect all their salespeople to be experts on everything, but I think stores should expect their employees to have some level of ability with what they're selling. I think it would be nice if employees specialized in certain departments, so the computer salesperson could tell you everything about the computers available for sale. He wouldn't be expected to know about the cell phones, so could the focus on being helpful in his specific area.

What makes me most frustrated is when I realize I know more than the salesperson about a particular thing. I don't consider myself a tech buff, but a lot of this stuff isn't difficult to learn.

triumph

It really depends on the compression used and the rate of compression. If you are using the highest quality, you might be talking about 256k or more a second. When I had much less space I used to compress my tracks down to like 64k so I could squeeze more on my flash.

I used to work it out about a meg a minute. Not sure what is is for wmas and the like as my inventory is almost all mp3s.

So if you have 4 gigs of space, that would be about 4000 minutes of music. If the average song is 3.5 minutes or so, that would be like 1150 tracks roughly.

ninikins

I guess it's all a bit more complex than I imagined! 4 gigs sounds like it would be more than enough for me. Thanks for all the info.

capitalist_junkie

Yeah, 4 gigs seemed like enough for me when I got my iPod . . . but since then I've acquired far more music than I can fit on the device.

ninikins

I think something with around 500 songs worth of space would suit me fine.

etali

Perhaps the shop didn't want to say because a definitive answer isn't that easy to give without explaining how it was arrived at. If they said a low number of songs, some smart alec would contradict them and say 'But you can compress the songs down to a lot smaller and through headphones you wouldn't hear the difference', and if they give the answer assuming the songs were compressed, then the customer may return a few days later and try to get a refund because they can't fit that many songs on.

I used to work in tech support, and you can't win - people always want to contradict you, even when they don't understand the issue at hand.

philoSCIFI

My ipod shuffle is 1g and I managed to cram 177 songs at one point. I haven't gotten past that but am still trying. :P