Christmas came early and I got an MP3 player by Mpio.  Yeah!  OK now
it's time to buy an SD card to expand my playlist.  I don't know how
to download songs from the internet but I have figured out uploading
all my favorite cds and love it so far. Question:  How many songs
should I be able to fit on the common sd cards for sale?  Some cards
are 32mb, 64, 125, 256, 512, 1 gig.  Surely the length of the song
matters so let's just assume an average length of 3 minutes. But what
about quality?  Is it possible to save the songs from my cds in higher
and lower qualities in order to fit more or less songs on an sd card?

I was able to find info about numbers of pictures on a card but not
songs.  I hope a researcher can help find this info for me.

Hi genki2,

Thank you for your question.

I can give you a general guide on how many songs you can fit on a given card size.

As you assume, the quality of the song or bit size will also determine
how many songs you can fit within a given space.

As a song is longer it takes more space. A 3 min 128kbits/s song will
take twice as much space as a 3 min 64bits/s song. You can of course
recompress your songs to a lower quality to fit more of them within a
given space.

45 minutes of music at 64bits/s take up 25mb, this would equate to
fifteen  3 minute songs. So on a 64mb card, this would be a little
under 40 songs. On a 256mb card, this would be about 200 songs and so
forth. However these are overestimates because songs are on average
longer than 3 minutes.

64kbits/s is what is considered as acceptable quality for codecs such
as WMA or OGG Vorbis. More likely you would be using MP3, and
128kbits/s is considered acceptable quality for MP3. At 128kbits/s
you're talking at approximately 1 megabyte for 1 minute of music. So
on a 256mb card you would fit about 70 songs or so. Apple quotes about
the same for its Ipod players. It lists the Ipod 10gb as being able to
hold 2500 songs at 128kbits/s, which would equate to 63 songs on
256mb. Or about 250 songs on a 1Gbyte card.

If you want to calculate how much you can fit within a given size the
formula is as follows:

size in mb x 1000 x 8 / (quality in bits/s  x 60) = number of minutes
for that quality

e.g.
256 x 1000 x 8 / (128 x 60) = 266 minutes


Multiplication is by 1000 rather than 1024 because the definition of
Mb in storage is not the same as the definition for data
communications or the one that software uses.


Personally I wouldn't recommend anything under 256mb, because then you
just end up having to swap around the songs very frequently, and on
long trips, the music gets repetitive.


I hope this answers your question. If you require any clarifications,
please do not hesitate to ask.

Thanks.
endo


Search strategy

Apple Ipod specifications
http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html

fantastic...  thanks!

Thank you for the great rating and generous tip.
Regards,
endo