Bottomless iPod?

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

http://images.apple.com/ipod/images/indexipod_20040719a.gif

So, about a year back, I picked up the 40 GB iPod (which, as I look on the Apple website, it appears they don't make anymore). In any case, it purports to hold 10,000 songs. I looked at mine today and wha-hey! Whaddya know?: I have 10,142 on it.

Should I be concerned? Will it splutter, wheeze and expire on me from the sheer weight of all that music? Or maybe did I win the Wonka Golden Ticket iPod that can hold an indeterminate amount of songs (rounded off to infinity).

Anyone else ever spot this?

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:02 (twenty years ago)

It's the number of GBs that matter not the number of songs. The 10,000 songs is just an estimate of how many mp3s at whatever average bitrate and song length Apple chose a 40GB drive could hold. It could probably hold a million songs if all your mp3s were all 10 seconds long and 64KB/sec.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:07 (twenty years ago)

If your iPod is holding more than 40GB though that is rather mysterious.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:08 (twenty years ago)

Ah, got it. Cheers, Alex. Must be all those 80's hardcore tunes that are under a minute in length.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:09 (twenty years ago)

I have the 40 GB one too. It's really the perfect size, i don't know why they phased it out.

― Hari A$hur$t (Toaster), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:10 (twenty years ago)

yeah, it's not like there's 10,000 "slots." depends on how long your songs are, bitrate etc.

or, what alex said.

(xxxxp)

― s1ocki (slutsky), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:11 (twenty years ago)

also, still bugs me that they're not REALLY 40 gb.

― s1ocki (slutsky), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:11 (twenty years ago)

also, still bugs me that they're not REALLY 40 gb.

Wait, I don't get it. Are they actually under 40 gb or something?

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:13 (twenty years ago)

Can you tell I'm a Luddite?

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:13 (twenty years ago)

Well the operating system and stuff takes up like 1.5GB so really it's 38.5 gigs or whatever. It is kind of lame.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:13 (twenty years ago)

I though the little case contained a miniature library staffed by miniscule staffers (the iPodlings) who will one day, rise up and crawl through my headphones and eat my brain.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:14 (twenty years ago)

I got a 40GB NEO car mp3 player in 2003 and when it gets full (It's really 38-39GBs or something as well) it won't shuffle and freezes. :(

And yes, the actual storage space on many hard drives is actually 1-3% below the listed it seems.

― Cunga (Cunga), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:14 (twenty years ago)

it ain't the operating system, it's the fact that advertised hard drive space (and EVERYONE does this scam) is metric, ie you get 40,000,000,000 bytes exactly. while computers read it in the binary way (ie 1024 bytes = 1kb). so it's less.

― s1ocki (slutsky), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:21 (twenty years ago)

i'm totally pissed,
i was going to buy
an ipod (finally)
this week and i wanted
the 40 gig, and come
to find out they are
no longer being made.

― brokenfuses (brokenfuses), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:23 (twenty years ago)

You are a retard if you think the os takes 1.5 gigabyets. Actually i have the real answer. using the fat32 file format 1 kilobytes is actually 1024 bytes not 1000. If you do the math, youll get the 38.5 or whatever. if you think the os on an ipod is 1.5 gb you obviously know jack shit about computers.

― David the owner, Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:31 (twenty years ago)

http://www.mandys-web.de/images/Simpsons/Comicbookguy.jpg

― wetmink (wetmink), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:41 (twenty years ago)

Wow, what a hostile lecture!

― joseph cotten (joseph cotten), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:41 (twenty years ago)

(xpost)Wow that was hostile.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:42 (twenty years ago)

he IS the owner.

― s1ocki (slutsky), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:45 (twenty years ago)

More like David the Pwner! You'll probably do better with Mac format, FWIW.

― J W, Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:45 (twenty years ago)

Anyway I have no idea how big the OS is (it does take up some space though because I just did that calc on 20GB and it comes out to 19.5GB and I'm sure that mine had far far less space than that before I ever started putting music on it) but I actually never knew that byte to GB thing (although I always wondered why the values on files were so weirdly different) So thanks to the smart guy who told me first, slocki, and nuts to you for being a pompous dick, "David".

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:46 (twenty years ago)

Using the same brilliant scam, I suddenly weigh several kilograms less! (1 kg = 1024 grams, right? Woohoo!) Thanks!

― StanM, Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:48 (twenty years ago)

word up alex!

― s1ocki (slutsky), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:51 (twenty years ago)

Actually it does come out to 18.6. The hard drive marketing "GB" is 1000 x 1000 x 1000, the actual GB anywhere else (not just FAT32, but maybe David just knows jack shit about computers) is 1024 x 1024 x 1024.

20 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 18.6

― wetmink (wetmink), Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:52 (twenty years ago)

The overhead beyond the filesystem - mp3 DB, OS, etc. - cant be more than a few dozen megabytes.

― JW, Saturday, 4 June 2005 22:57 (twenty years ago)

David = "Worst. Post. Ever."

― VegemiteGrrl (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, 4 June 2005 23:05 (twenty years ago)

alex in nyc's ipod must contain the complete works of anal cunt!

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Saturday, 4 June 2005 23:18 (twenty years ago)

Mine does!!!! (Well 50+ songs....)

― Ian John50n (orion), Saturday, 4 June 2005 23:32 (twenty years ago)

^ JW

― Ian John50n (orion), Saturday, 4 June 2005 23:33 (twenty years ago)

My Creative Jukebox Nomad Zen Explorer whatever the fuck it's called was basically just about FULL when the headphone jack thingy went rendering it useless, although not quite as useless as Creative Labs technical support.

I wish - I wish! - I'd bought an Ipod.

― Gatinha (rwillmsen), Sunday, 5 June 2005 00:32 (twenty years ago)

They don't make 40's anymore? What do they make, 20's and 60's?

I've had a 20 for about 8 months and I'm still nowhere close to filling it up (I have about 12 GB, I think).

― Jordan (Jordan), Sunday, 5 June 2005 00:54 (twenty years ago)

my ipod's headphone jack is acting fucky too...

― s1ocki (slutsky), Sunday, 5 June 2005 00:57 (twenty years ago)

they make the 20gb, the 30 gb with color screen, 40 gb with color screen, and 60 gb with color screen. the thing is that the normal 40gb (without the color screen) was only $350 and the new 40gb with the color screen is somewhere around $450 or something.

― That One Guy (That One Guy), Sunday, 5 June 2005 01:01 (twenty years ago)

i didn't know that! i bought the 20gb, which i've only filled half of, since i keep taking stuff off when i get tired of it.

― to let - flats (Jody Beth Rosen), Sunday, 5 June 2005 01:05 (twenty years ago)

using the fat32 file format 1 kilobytes is actually 1024 bytes not 1000.

This has nothing to do with fat32 (this was also said upthread). In binary, 1000 (dec) = 1111101000; 1024 (dec) = 10000000000, a much more meaningful value in computing. 1 kilobyte is not actually a metric kilo of bytes. Although I've read that some hard drive manufacturers are starting to use the metric values to measure capacity now, instead of the binary ones. So 40 gigabytes will actually equal 40,000,000,000 bytes in some cases.

Pendantic note: It's GB, not gb. Uppercase G indicates the binary form. Also lowercase b indicates bits, not bytes. So Gb would be gigabit.

― kickitcricket (kickitcricket), Sunday, 5 June 2005 01:13 (twenty years ago)

yeah i have the 20gb and i do the same thing.
right now i'm at a little over 9gb's full.

― That One Guy (That One Guy), Sunday, 5 June 2005 01:23 (twenty years ago)

01011001100010110111010101000111011000101101111001010010010101010111101001101010101000
11000110010101010100100001001001010100010010110001011111000011001101011001011101110101
01010101110000111100110010001100111001101111001100001100101010101011110110101111111100
00111010111001110010011101110011000011011001100110011001100110011001111011111000001101
01010101010001000100011000101111001100101110010011001011001010101100110110111001100111
11011101010100011101100010110111100101001001010101011110100110101010100001010101110011
11000110010101010100100001001001010100010010110001011111000011001101011001011101110101
01010101110000111100110010001100111001101111001100001100101010101011110110101111111100
00111010111001110010011101110011000011011001100110011001100110011001111011111000001101
01010101010001000100011000101111001100101110010011001011001010101100110110111001100111

― Pleasant Plains /// (Pleasant Plains ///), Sunday, 5 June 2005 02:07 (twenty years ago)

You fucking clownshoes!! You know dick about computers!!!!!!!!!

― Andrew (enneff), Sunday, 5 June 2005 03:14 (twenty years ago)

It's been proposed to dump the decimal prefixes altogether (G = giga = 10^9) and use binary prefixes instead (Gi = gibi = 2^30) when referring to computer storage. I can't see it catching on. (Kibi, mebi, tebi, pebi and exbi all sound cute enough though).

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Sunday, 5 June 2005 08:59 (twenty years ago)

Kibi, mebi, tebi, pebi and exbi

They sound like a Finnish cartoon about frogs that form a rock band!

― joseph cotten (joseph cotten), Sunday, 5 June 2005 12:46 (twenty years ago)

I've filled my 40GB, but it's only got 3500 "songs." Then again, about 1/2 of what I have on there are mixes, usually between 60 and 90 MB in length...

― paulhw (paulhw), Sunday, 5 June 2005 15:20 (twenty years ago)

My 40GB holds around 7000 songs. Which sucks now that I have 7500 in my iTunes library and thus have to constantly make choices about what goes in and what stays off.

― jaymc (jaymc), Sunday, 5 June 2005 15:25 (twenty years ago)

Yeah, I was going to ask: does an ipod have any kind of "memory" that takes up space...can you, over a long period, keep deleting old or dumb music and replacing it with better stuff, and expect to retain the same space?

― paulhw (paulhw), Sunday, 5 June 2005 15:31 (twenty years ago)

I don't see why not.

― jaymc (jaymc), Sunday, 5 June 2005 15:35 (twenty years ago)

i don't understand the question.

― s1ocki (slutsky), Sunday, 5 June 2005 16:51 (twenty years ago)

You have to have a color-coded iPod for each day of the week or else all your mp3s spontaneously explode and then you die.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 5 June 2005 16:54 (twenty years ago)

PaulHW... Assuming an ipod works like any other hard disk (which I'm sure it does), the only problem you could face ultimately is that of fragmentation.

Fragmentation occurs when say you delete one track from an ipod and record a new one, then if the new track doesn't fit into the space the old one left, then it'll need to fill the space it can and put the rest somewhere else on the disk. This means that the disk head needs to move more when playing that track.

Ultimately this problem can compound itself until lots of tracks are spread all over the disk physically.

This can become a problem on computers, when millions of small files are created and destroyed all the time.

In practice, on an ipod or similar device, you're not going to be creating and deleting enough for this to become any sort of problem with typical use.

― KeefW (kmw), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:10 (twenty years ago)

(Kibi, mebi, tebi, pebi and exbi all sound cute enough though)

These sound like prefixes for Pokemons.

HFS+ is fragmentation resistent.

― Cool Hand Luuke (ex machina), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:31 (twenty years ago)

A quick scan of that suggests that it defragments as it goes... Usual tradeoff there then I suppose. Means that your filesystem is going to be slower on average than if it had not been defragmenting as it goes, but doesn't need one-off defragmentations every now and again.

Interesting article, thanks.

Again though, nothing that's going to affect an ipod.

― KeefW (kmw), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:38 (twenty years ago)

So is that the filesystem used in an ipod? The uninformed guy who knows jack shit about computers upthread suggested it was FAT32...

― KeefW (kmw), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:40 (twenty years ago)

Windows formatted iPods use FAT32.
OS X only ipods use HFS+.

Access to the iPod uses the standard filesystem drivers for whichever is running.

― Cool Hand Luuke (ex machina), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:49 (twenty years ago)

Thanks KeefW (and Cool Hand), that's what I was wondering...

― paulhw (paulhw), Sunday, 5 June 2005 20:14 (twenty years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.