Hi,
I just burned 94 Christmas songs onto a Writable CD as MP3's, which
took up 520 megs of the 700 meg CD.
The only way you could get 60 songs in 128 megs of space is if each
mp3 is 2 megs or less. This is possible, but the quality of the mp3's
would be very poor for the most part. The average size of MP3's for
popular songs today (about 3 to 4 minutes of play time each) is about
3.5 - 4.3 megs in size, when you keep the quality at a reasonable
level. 128 megs would therefore be able to hold about 28 to 30 songs.
This is much less than 60, but as I suggested before, you could get 60
in there, if the MP3's were made with very low quality WAV files, and
were only 2 megs in size. But either way, there would be more than the
10 or 12 songs that a typical CD format disk could hold.
The CD music disks (the basic digital music CD you purchase at the
store), are not in MP3 format they are in digital music format, and
each track takes up much more room. Depending on the song, the basic
formula is 10 megs per minute for digital music format. MP3's reduce
this requirement down drastically. A write up on how this is done can
be found here:
Behind the Mask (Sound on Sound)
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may00/articles/mp3.htm
So, is any of that true, well, ... yes, if we are just dealing with
facts and not really going to listen to anything, but in typical real
world usage, the answer is no, only about half that many are going to
be able to play on an MP3 player with 128 megs of space for files.
As a personal note and my own experience, a diskless mp3 player(such
as the one you are describing), is much nicer, in my mind, than the
players that use the MP3 disks. I have a Rio, which play MP3 formatted
disks. The CD's I make, as I mentioned hold about 90 to 120 songs per
disk, but once you burn them, that's it, they are burnt. There are
some disk players out there now that will also be able to play the
re-writable disk, which is nice, but not having to deal with the disks
at all, is even better. The players are typically smaller (much
smaller) lighter in weight, and more durable, than the players that
use the CDROM disks, and 20 to 30 songs is usually enough to get to
work and back, and even through lunch. Switching out songs is normally
much easier, especially if you are looking at an iPod player (which my
friend has).
Another advantage to the iPod is that it doesn't really care what the
files are, you can put in doc files and data file and images as well,
for transport from one place to another (my friend does this with his
college homework files). Not all digital players do this, so if that
sounds like something you are interested in be sure to check that the
player you are looking at has this ability.
The disadvantages lie mostly in the price of these players. They tend
to be much more expensive than the players that use the MP3 disks. I
just purchased one for my son that cost less than 60.00 US, whereas
the iPod is 299.00 US (of course it has 20 Gigs of storage as well).
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore?family=iPod
thanks,
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