Song Capacity Calculator for MP3 Players
Filed under Podcasting
If you’re considering buying an MP3 player, or are just wondering how much of your music collection will fit on to one, then this little utility could be just what you’re looking for.
The memory, or storage capacity, of an MP3 player is usually measured in GB (Giga Bytes), or MB (Mega Bytes) for the smaller/older players. However, the number of songs that your MP3 player can potentially store is not only determined by its memory capacity, but also by the bit rate of your MP3 tracks.
If you’re not sure of what a bit rate is, or what it has to do with things, then the previous article on What are bit rates? may help explain things for you.
If you’ve already got a collection of music in MP3 format (or one of the other popular music compression formats such as WMA or AAC), then your bit rates have already been set. However, when you’re converting your music from CD to MP3 (ripping as it’s called), you should be able to choose the bit rate most suitable to your requirements from within your chosen conversion software. 128 kbps is usually a good starting point as a compromise between sound quality and storage requirements.
MP3 Song Capacity Calculator
Assumptions
The MP3 Song Capacity Calculator makes a few assumptions for its calculations. As such the quoted results are only approximations and may vary from actual results. The key assumptions are:
- Average album length is 45 minutes
- Average song length is 3 minutes 30 seconds
- All MP3 track data is 100% audio
- All of the MP3 player’s memory can be utilised
Posted on 19 April 2008
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17 May 2008 at 11:01 am
Dear Richard
Handy page - or so I thought until I noticed the bug…
Looks like for a given bitrate choice, the same values for Hours of Music: etc are calculated for both 4GB and 8GB capacity. Just a copy/paste typo I think:
4 GB 8 GB
in line 133 of your html source.
The 16GB entry is OK - haven’t checked the rest!
Nearly put me off the 8GB player I was looking at til I realised that the 16GB looked like 4 times the size!!!
Cheers, James
17 May 2008 at 3:25 pm
James: Thanks for pointing out the school boy error. Hopefully I’ve fixed it now and it’s back to being a “handy page” again. If you’d like to try it again, let me know if you find any other deliberate mistakes.