1000 songs fits in 5 GB and 4 GB

Here is the real answer. If you looked at the fine print in the marketing of the origional ipod, it stated how the 1000 song number was derived: 160kbps mp3 the new ipod 'standard' is 128kbps aac. easy as that.

Not that any of you CARES as such, but I tend to encode audio intended for my iPod at 96k, in AAC format. Why so low? Well, it sounds fine to me. I'm listening to it on headphones, too. The end result is I can fit waaaaaaaaay more than 1,000 songs on my 6gb mini. Not that I ever had time to listen to all that, but...

Hey #29 Edward. How about thinking about what you have just said. MP4 is a lossy format just like MP3. You can convert an MP3 back to AIFF but you had already lost something converting to MP3 in the first place. Convert it again and you'll lose more. When you post you get two chances at not making a fool out of yourself but you still managed to do it.

1000 sounds better. Nuff said.

"I don't know if was wise to convert your whole library to AAC... you may find yourself wanting that new media player that unfortunately doesn't play your MP4s" Wow. You convert it fucking back. That's a real problem.

I don't even pay attention to that slogans, in fact, I thought the slogan for the nano was only "Impossibly small." Anyways, not even 500 of my songs fit in 4GB.

I Believe Apple originally used the 192kbps for measuring song count. Oh well. I'm close enough. But that's why it changed.

Daniel, I actually did it the hard but purist way: I re-ripped all the CD's I still had, which was just over 100 albums. Pain in the rear I know, but your second option: transcoding the music (going from mp3 to aac) will throw out some of the quality. I did have to do that with a small remainder of my music. If quality isn't as big of a deal in the case of transcoding, just go into iTunes preferences and change your importing settings to AAC. (in iTunes 5 this has been moved under the Advanced preference pane) Then select music in your library, go up to the menu and chose Advanced > Convert selection... and let 'er fly. Afterwards, all the original songs will still be selected, so just hit delete to remove the old songs from iTunes, as that will also delete the actual mp3's from your library. Hope this helps!

David, How did you go about converting your entire library to AAC? My GF recently switched to Mac and I would love to convert all her mp3s over. Thanks!

It seems to me that I remember back when the 1G came out, there was a lot of talk about how Apple's math was off, and that it could actually hold a bit more than 1000 songs given the calculations Apple was using. Apple said that an ad campaign that said "1026 songs in your pocket" didn't have the same ring to it (I'm paraphrasing, and I don't remember what the actual number was).