Increased free space sixfold
by Volker Weber
Even a 20 gig iPod will fill up over time. Woodstock had about 700 meg free Friday night when I chatted with Thomas Cloer. He had a little hangover after DJing with two iPods the night before. He casually mentioned that he had converted his own MP3 collection the the proprietary Apple AAC format. I told him that I will keep mine in MP3 format.
Still, he got me thinking. So I lnspected the mess that I had created over the years. When I started ripping CDs a few years ago, I created the then default of 128 kbps. Later I switched to 192 and even 256 kbps. The trouble is: I cannot tell the difference. Maybe my ears are getting old or I just developed more tolerance. Anyway, Apple claims that 128 kbps AAC have the same quality as 160 kbps MP3. So I told Lucy to convert all MP3s with more than 128 kbps to AAC. It took her oneandahalf days to crank out roughly 2000 new files. I then deleted the old files, hooked up Woodstock and when I returned half an hour later he had synchronized the new and removed the old files. iTunes tells me this:
Thus free space on Woodstock jumped from 700 meg to 4300 meg. All my files are now 128 kbps, the older 1400 in mp3 and the newer 2000 in the AAC format. I now have space for another 1000 songs on the iPod.
Comments
Just for kicks, I restored the iPod today to factory settings (which formats the drive) and then did a new sync. I never timed it but I know now that it transfers 10 gig in 30 minutes from the Mac.
Complete restore: 42 minutes flat.
Interesting; I'd heard that about 128k AAC files also. Maybe I will convert my 192kps MP3s, as my Mac has precious little hard drive space (4 gig drives don't really cut it any more... ;-)
What about quality loss? MP3 is a lossy format, and so is AAC. Is there any obvious quality loss when converting from one to the other?
In theory, there probably is. In practice, I don't know. :-)