Bitrate Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

iTunes 10.6 adds option to sync 192kbps, 256kbps audio

by Kelly Hodgkins (Mar 12th, 2012)

According to AppleInsider, Apple snuck in two new bitrate options into iTunes 10.6 for users who sync their iTunes library to their iPhone or iPad. Most audio tracks are encoded at 256 kbps if they're bought from the iTunes Store, and now you can keep that quality when you send your files to your ...

How to squash a syncing bug in iTunes 9.1.1

by Chris Rawson (May 7th, 2010)

iTunes 9.1 brought a feature to all iPods that had previously only existed for the Shuffle: the ability to sync lower bitrate, 128 kbps AAC versions of songs. With only a modest reduction in sound quality, enabling this feature saved nearly 2 GB of space on my 16 GB iPhone 3G. After enabling it, the ...

iPhone 101: Save space on your iPhone without removing a thing

by Michael Grothaus (Apr 6th, 2010)

It's important to note that this on-the-fly conversion does not alter your original files inside your iTunes library -- those will remain at whatever bitrate and in whatever file format you had them in. How well does this work? I saved a whopping 1.5GBs of space on my 8GB iPhone. Others here at ...

iLounge unveils iPod Storage Calculator

by David Chartier (Oct 23rd, 2006)

Apple offers their own advertising-friendly estimation of how many songs each model of iPod can hold, but those numbers are based on fairly unrealistic standards of 128Kbps AAC songs that are a mere 4 minutes long. Toss in a few tracks from Phish or Beethoven's 5th, and you can easily hurl this song ...