new user- question on music files- what does 12 gigs get you?

[paulkolp]

Not being all that familiar with data storage, compression and transfer I need a little education here:

If I get a 4 gig D2+ 8 gig memory card for a total of 12 gigs, to me that only equals about 12 albums, if say many of the shows that I have are 800 Meg live shows. Does that ring true?

I suppose I need to then look @ what format they are in, right? I think that they are .flac files..........

THe next question is then, is there a way to further compress? I geuss the crux is that there are some formats that take up more memory and thus better sound quality.

Any help would be appreciated

[St.MPA3b]

flac = ~200 Mb per album
mp3 = ~60 Mb per album

1 Gb = 1024 Mb :)

Now difference:
wav - not compressed, not cutted (lossless)
ape, flac - compressed, not cutted (lossless)
mp3. ogg - compressed, cutted (lossy)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_data_compression

[Dominic]

no no, flac = 300-400 mb per album for me (metal and classical here)

live shows being generally 2-3 cds long paul your estimate is accurate enough

[scotty6435]

192-320kbps variable bit-rate MP3s (encoded with LAME :)) take up between 100 and 150MB per album which is pretty reasonable. Approx 4 gigs gets me 750 songs.

[keal]

The next question is then, is there a way to further compress? I geuss the crux is that there are some formats that take up more memory and thus better sound quality.

Any help would be appreciated
When you get your D2, it'll come with jetAudio software, which has built-in converting options for video and audio. You'll be able to experiment with all the different formats and bitrates. [smile]

It really boils down to how you feel about storage space versus the audio/video quality. You might feel, for your live music sets, that the drastic size savings of converting from FLAC to, say, 192kbps mp3 is so awesome that you'll convert all your live stuff. But you might have some vintage Bob Marley stuff that just has to be FLAC, so you can leave that alone (haha!)

You can try converting a couple of your albums to mp3 now, before you get a D2. Then you can compare their size and quality to their flac versions - and you can then plan how you'll be using the 12gb.

[GSV3MiaC]

MP3 is (IMO) pretty poor at low bitrates. Try variable bit rate .ogg or even .wma, and be amazed at how (relatively) good a mere 80 or 96 kb/sec can sound.

(or use WinABX to demonstrate you really can tell the difference).

[eloj]

Yep, for a device like this, 80kbps ogg vorbis is the way to go if you want to cram it full.

The quickest way to convert FLAC files will be using the lancer version of oggdropxpd (http://homepage3.nifty.com/blacksword/). Scroll down to "oggdropXPd" and pick a version suitable for your computer. The "mt" versions are for computers with more than one CPU core. Unpack, run and right click and set "Encode options" to quality 1.00

Then you can just drag and drop files onto the window and they will be compressed with vorbis and written to the same directory with the FLAC file.

[ProDigit]

12GB would actually not be 12x1024MB, but would be more like 12.000.000.000 bytes (= 11,17GB).

This has to do with marketing decisions.
Manifacturers say on the package 4GB for instance but in real fact you only would get 4.000.000.000 bytes of space.

out of those 12.000.000.000 bytes, your OS will also need some space.
So for easy calculation one could say your effective space would be 11,15GB (providing 20Mb for system OS).

On 11,15GB:
For 320kbit MP3 you have little more then 83 hours of music.
For Q3 OGG (about 112kbit, which is equivalent to 224kbits CBR or greater MP3, and perfect for high quality music), you'll get about 238 hours of music on your device.

for speechfiles encoded in WMA9 32Kbps (good for low quality audio and streaming data) you'll get about 833 hours of speech, or about 34,5 days of talk.

Speechfiles encoded in 48Kbps stereo WMA (good for audiobooks) will give you about 23 days of speech audio.


I'm not familiar with good settings for video or FLAC, but mathematically I could calculate that for the 11,15GB of space you can store about:
500Kbps video gives you about 53 hours of video storage wise.

11,15GB space can store you about:
11.417 JPEG photo's taken by a camera at 1MB/jpeg (bout 6-7Mpix camera's), or about:
17.193 JPEG photo's compressed to 687kbytes (which is average for 1280x1024 pix for holiday pictures)

it can store you about 11.972.221.337 letters in a textfile...(pure hypothetically speaking).



About the better compressing:
I would advise you OGG Q3 (which is 112kbps VBR, but sounds better then MP3's VBR, and better then MP3 224Kbps CBR).
OGG Q2 is comparable to a good MP3 160Kbps encoding, and will not audibly make you hear much difference between the original and the encoded version, only somewhere you can sense which is which if you would listen very carefully.
My average .OGG encodings are 2 to 3 times smaller then my MP3 versions.

For video you can only use mpeg4, though .AVC is an even better codec for this device (unfortunately it's not able to playback this type of video's).

For speech, I'd advise 48Kbps .WMA, which is a very good Quality/compression ratio for me.
In speechfiles what matters is being able to hear, and understand the spokesman, and the imperfections due to compression play a smaller role in it.
32Kbps WMA also is a good compression rate, but the artifacts produced by the compression, when listening for longer periods of times, can become a bit tyring or annoying.

[doniago]

The OP hasn't made any new posts since May, so I'd tend to assume this is a dead thread... I'll leave the thread open for now, but I think unless we hear from him we should assume comments for the OP will go unseen.

[Dominic]

I think ProDigits comment would be an asset to others though doniago, that's if they use the search feature :P

[doniago]

Big "if". :)

Hey, the post's there even if I did lock the thread, and I'm not doing that unless this thread becomes a large string of off-topic stuff or something...

...oh, like this post. :)

Sorry, I'm in a mood. You can see why in the website forum.

[usapatriot]

I have about 510 songs on my D2 right now with about 500mb of free space left.

I have a 4gb D2.

Including multiple albums ripped at 256kbps.