laboitenoire

Alright, let's say you just got that nice new shiny Creative Zen Nano Plus with 1GB of storage, claiming that it should hold several hours of music. However, loading it up, you find out that you can't fit all of those CDs you wanted onto that little player, even though you should be able to. Consequently, you realize it was a bad move to buy a 1GB flash player and return it to get an iPod. However, you really can fit more music on that player. How? Well, there's several different ways you can do this, none of which require you to shell out another $100 or so. We'll start off with the most basic way to do this.

Fitting More Music by Changing the Encoding Bit Rate:

Most people out there use a media player to rip music. These often allow you to change how much data is used per second to capture an audio file. At the most basic level, you have the .wav format, which is completely uncompressed. In other words, if the song takes 26MB on the CD, it'll be a 26MB file on your computer. Then you have .mp3 (MPEG Layer-3) and .wma (Windows Media Audio), which are some of the current digital music formats. They're compressed, so you lose some data when a song ripped onto your computer. You usually can change the bit rate of an mp3 or a wma from anywhere between 256 kbps to 32 kbps. Most people will find that a bit rate below 80 kbps is incredibly flat, and doesn't really sound good any more. I find that the best balance between quality and size is 96 kbps, although you might disagree and find 128 kbps or even 64 kbps to be more to your liking. Anyway, to change these you usually just go into your options or preferences box and tell it to rip at a different bit rate.

Fitting More Music by Changing the Sampling Rate:

Alright, some people out there who are starting to get older can't hear frequencies as high as when they were younger. Music files also have a thing called the sample rate associated with them. There are many sample rates, but some of the more common ones include 44.1KHz, 96KHz, and 192KHz. Music is usually recorded and ripped at 44.1KHz. Why? Our ears can't hear frequencies above that. That's the realm of silent dog whistles and things bats can hear. So, if you are not able to hear higher frequencies (i.e. over around 30KHz), you can rip at a lower sample rate and never be able to tell the difference. There's a nice little sample rate called 22KHz, which records any frequency lower that 22KHz. That's half of the frequencies recorded at 44.1KHz, so each file is significantly smaller. Changing a files sample rate is a bit more involved than changing bit rate. The way my dad does it (he's 52, so he came up with this little bit) is he uses an audio editing program called Goldwave to convert music to the lower sample rate. Goldwave is shareware, but you can do several hundred steps before you need to restart the program. I bought it, and it's what I use to do audio manipulation. You need to open up the file menu, and there will be an option called Batch Processing. Here, you can tell it to perform a series of steps on a track. For this, you'll want to tell it to convert the files into the audio format of your choice (mp3, wma, but not aac) at 22000Hz. You'll need to specify which folders to look in for the music, and you also tell it to discriminate against files of certain formats (so you can tell it to only peform these steps on wma files only, for example). Run batch processing, and you'll have files sampled at 22KHz.

Fitting More Music on Players That Use My Computer to Transfer Files:

Players like my Zen Nano Plus can use My Computer to transfer files onto the player. I prefer it over Creative's software, because it isn't annoying to use. However, using Explorer to copy files copies everything in the folder if you drag and drop folders. This includes the album art and all of those related files. While they are usually only a few kilobytes in size, you'll find that they add up. So turn on the option to be able to view hidden files and folders, and then delete everything that isn't a music file off of the player. I was able to free up about 3MB by doing this, which is enough for another song or two depending on length.


So that's my FAQ on getting more music onto your player, and now you can tell your friends that you got more music on your player than they have on their expensive iPod Nano.

laboitenoire

Any thoughts, people?

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phantomgrave

I use 64 kbps bitrate to put songs on my little 512MB RCA LYRA, i can hold about 250ish songs, now i need to buy a 512 add on card to hold MORE MORE MORE. Good FAQ though.

born2killU

lol i had a creative zen 1gb but i bought a 40gb ipod because they are even more shiny...er

BFRD

If you just use headphones, that is fine. I have my ipod hooked up to my car stereo. I can tell a huge difference if I skimp on the bitrate. I don't do anything less than 192. Granted any audiophile would shudder to even listen to an mp3, this is the best bitrate rate for me.

I am not wanting to step on your thread, just suggesting that before anybody starts ripping an entire collection, make sure they are happy with the settings.

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laboitenoire

Well, yeah, I like uncompressed music, but I'm not gonna drag my CD collection along on all my trips. Glad to hear people like it.