My CD collection has become quite large and so I am thinking about buying an MP3 player. I have looked into features and have read a little on certain products, but still have some questions I was hoping people could clear up. First off, how much music is 1 GB? It seems to be getting pretty high the amount of music you can put on these things nowadays. Also, is there a feature on these players which enables a user to file a CD under a genre, such as “rock,” and then afterwards have the option to listen to songs from a particular genre, or the entire list of songs on the player? Seems like that’d be a logical feature to me, but I’m not sure. Also, what’s the big deal about the Ipod? What makes it sooo amazing that everybody just has to have the newest 1 month old model?
It depends on the quality.
1GB are 1,073,741,824 Bytes (1024^3 Bytes)
“CD-Quality” is said to be for mp3 music having a fixed data rate of
128 kBits/s which is 16,000 Bytes.
Thus, you can fit about 67,108.894 sec of music on a 1GB mp3 player,
which is about 18.641351111 hours of music.
Hope this helps.
It depends on the quality.
1GB are 1,073,741,824 Bytes (1024^3 Bytes)
“CD-Quality” is said to be for mp3 music having a fixed data rate of
128 kBits/s which is 16,000 Bytes.
Thus, you can fit about 67,108.894 sec of music on a 1GB mp3 player,
which is about 18.641351111 hours of music.
Hope this helps.[/quote]
Which is about 300 songs (for normal people who don’t measure their music collection in time, 
)
As for the iPod, the reason so many people like it is twofold.
One its the style/trendiness factor.
The other is the easy-to-use interface. Imagine you have 5000 songs on your mp3 player. You don’t want to have to scroll through them one at a time. What you need is some why to find what you want as quickly as possible. That’s where Apple’s scroll wheel comes in. You should ask someone if you can see their iPod and just see how easy it is to use. That’s why I’m happiest with mine, despite the fact that it doesn’t have a built-in FM radio or sother snazzy things.
Hmm, I have no idea how many songs I have, or how many hours of music. All I know is that it is almost 20 GB and close to be too much for my 3 year old iPod. I can give byte-exact info once I looked on my HD this evening. Do I need help now? Am I not normal? :help: :help:
And the iPod lets you browse your music by artist, album, song title, composer, and genre. It’s amazing.
The 4 gig nano will let you store 1000 4 minute songs encoded at 128 kbit. I store all my music at 224 so I get slightly more than half the number of songs. The quality is significantly better and very noticble with my earphones that cost more than my iPod. 
iTunes also keeps track of how many times and the last time you played a song. And you can rate them from 1 to 5 songs. So I can create smart playlists that might say:
songs I haven’t played in the last 2 months
rock songs rated at 3 stars or above
my 200 top played songs
5 star songs
or anything. They’re automatically updated. It’s wonderful.
The iPod can also display album covers and song lyrics. There are programs out there that can automaticlly attach art and lyrics to your song in iTunes.
It was also announced today the iTunes music store in the US is the 7th biggest music retailer, even ahead of Borders.
I think we should be honest about the cons too…
IPods cannot play Windows Media, or (obviously) Windows Media with DRM protection.
This means the ONLY music you can (legally) download for the iPod is from iTunes (incidentally, no other MP3 player can play this music). Now the problem is that there is no iTunes Music store in Taiwan, and if you try to access the UK site (for example) from Taiwan, it knows and doesn’t let you in.
There appear to be ways round this, like using a UK credit card and home address, etc, though I did try using my address in the UK and it still didn’t let me in.
As it happens, all my music has been ripped from CDs, so it doesn’t really bother me at the moment.
Since we’re on the subject… at least when you buy protected content from iTunes, it’s yours to keep. Music purchased from other legal sites expires if you don’t continue to pay your membership, so you’re basically renting it.
That’s ok.
Any mp3s or music you convert from your own CDs are playable anywhere. It’s ok if music I buy from iTunes can only be played on my iPod. The iPod will always and forever be the easiest to use digital music player.
And AAC, a format invented by Dolby, sounds better than mp3. AACs are playable with many newer players like the Sony Walkman cell phones.
[quote=“gary”] That’s ok.
Any mp3s or music you convert from your own CDs are playable anywhere. It’s ok if music I buy from iTunes can only be played on my iPod. The iPod will always and forever be the easiest to use digital music player.
And AAC, a format invented by Dolby, sounds better than mp3. AACs are playable with many newer players like the Sony Walkman cell phones.[/quote]
But iPods don’t play AAC. They play m4a (or m4p) (haven’t we had this discussion somewhere else, or was it with jlick?). Although m4a is AAC wrapped up in an mpeg4 package, they are not one in the same. Similarly, any phones or other devices that play AAC cannot play m4a, which iTunes rips by default (as I’m sure you know gary), but confusingly labels as AAC (not exactly a lie, but confusing, since it’s not raw AAC).
Anyway… I still recommend an iPod 