512mp3 player full too soon???

titewad_2

after some excellent help and tips from members here,I managed to rip some of my daughters cd's to wma,then transfer them to her mp3 player.I was expecting to get up to 170 songs in this format however I am getting drive full message at 98 songs.I've added up the megabytes of the collective folders I transferred and they total 370mb.The player is an mpman 512mb.Any ideas as to why this is please..

alexj2002

If the drive shows up in My Computer right click on it and click properties.

Then you'll get the proper size of the drive - because of the way they're formatted etc. you may lose some space however you sound like you've lost quite a bit.

The amount of songs you can put on is related to the quality you encode (convert to MP3) them. A higher quality (bit-rate) means a larger file which means you'll get less songs.

the_grey_lantern

I take it you are taking the 170 track figure from the documentation that came with the mp3 player?

Basically, as with all mp3 players, the maximum amount of tracks they say it will hold usually refers to a situation where you rip them at the lowest possible quality.

A typical 3 minute 128kbs mp3 is around 3.5MB and you have 98 tracks on the mp3 player. So 98 * 3.5 = 343MB. This is a little less than your total so I guess your mp3s are averging 3.75MB each

I don't know what ripping software you are using but there will be a setting in there for the 'bit-rate'. If you want to fit more songs on the mp3 player you will need to lower this.

I wouldn't recommend going below 128kbps. I am a bit of an audiophile and I won't rip at less than 320kbps!

Hope that information was useful to you.

alexj2002

I'd agree with using 128kbps as a bare minimum for use with headphones. Mine too are recorded much higher for playing out over speakers and because there's room on my 60GB MP3 player.

But if it's actual drive space it's likely to be the way it's formatted as i said previous. My 40GB Hard Drive on this PC is reported as 38.9GB - somewhere a whole GB has been lost with formatting.

StrikeEagle

1024

alexj2002

Yeah there's also the 1000/1024 (Binary and Decimal) - Hard Disk manufactures use binary whilst software tends to use decimal.

But on an MP3 player there's likely to be firmware on the flash drive (at least there was on mine) which does take up some space (and requires you to use the drives own format software as opposed to the windows one)