Songs take up much extra space

[Doug Broda]

I can't figure this one out. I have 2016 songs on my Touch. Clicking on Devices -> My Ipod -> Music, it says that they take up 3.43 GB, which is about the amount they take up on my HD. But when I look at Devices -> My Ipod, and look at the Capacity graphic, it says my songs take up 4.51 GB -- a ton more than they do on my HD. I don't recall this happening on my (much bigger) 4th gen Ipod.

What causes this extra space to be used up (and is it avoidable)?

[jhollington]

Hi and welcome to iLounge.

Keep in mind that the capacity bar shows more than the "Music" listing shows.... Podcasts, Audiobooks, and (ironically) Music Videos are also all displayed in the blue portion of the "Audio" capacity bar.

Although Music Videos are included in the "Music" category, audiobooks and podcasts are not. The "Podcasts" category will show all of your podcasts, with a total size, however within that category both audio and video podcasts are included, which are represented in different sections of the capacity bar.

Music Videos are represented by a slightly darker shade of blue, but they are still included in the number for "Audio" content.

[Doug Broda]

Many thanks for the reply. However, I don't have any podcasts, music videos or audiobooks. All that is on the Touch (which is unjailbroken), AFAIK is calendar and address book entries, Safari bookmarks, and a bunch of my own MP3s. No purchases from the Itunes Store at all.

[BlackWolf]

this is strange. What does your iPod say if you go to settings->general->about.
does it tell you the correct number of songs/videos/photos and does it tell you the same amount of used space as itunes does?
If nothing works you can always perform a restore via iTunes. It will wipe all data from your iPod, if you sync afterwards it should be fine. But maybe theres another way to solve this. seems like your ipod has songs on it which it maybe didn't delete/overwrite correctly. that's the only thing I could imagine. but if thats the case I'm afraid only a restore would help you.

[Doug Broda]

Here's all the info:
Settings/General/About on Ipod: Songs 2446 Video 0 Photos 0 Capacity 14.8 GB Available 9.4 GB

Devices, My Ipod, bottom of screen by bar: Capacity 14.84 GB; Audio 5.41 GB/2446 songs; Other 26.3 MB; Free Space 9.40 GB

Devices, My Ipod, Music: 2446 songs, 6.1 days, 4.18 GB

And here's the other observation... I don't think it's just a leftover fragment of something, because the gap between the two amounts gets larger each time I add more MP3s. Look at the first message above -- at 2016 songs the gap was 1.08 GB; now, with 2446 songs, and nothing added except more MP3s, the gap is 1.23 GB.

Could this have anything to do with the way ITunes now handles art or gapless playback? All these songs had art already in them (manually inserted by me) before putting them on the Touch.

[jhollington]

Actually, it very likely is the Artwork. From what I can tell, the iPod touch and iPhone now include artwork in the "Audio" (and "Video") categories, whereas the traditional iPod models still list it in the "Other" category.

However, your "Other" category is far too small to include album artwork for over 2000 tracks, since the artwork image (which is stored in a separate database) takes up around 376kb per track, and you only have 26.3MB of other (see our thread Photo Storage on the iPod (http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=66435) for more information on how artwork is stored on the iPod).

[Doug Broda]

So that still confuses me. If every piece of MP3 art is copied and it should go in Other, where is it hiding? (Note: Almost every one of the 2446 songs has one piece of art as part of the MP3 file, added in ITunes.)

[jhollington]

The point is that on the iPod touch (and iPhone) it doesn't get counted as "Other" but is instead included in the actual audio capacity count (the blue bar).

If you had an iPod classic or iPod nano, iTunes would show a much larger "Other" category to account for the album artwork, and the "Audio" category would probably be much closer to the total size of the audio files on the device. On an iPod touch it's listed as part of the music/audio storage.

Basically, when iTunes transfers a track to the iPod, it stores a copy of the artwork in a separate database for efficiency (it's faster to read the pre-sized artwork than to try to extract it from the MP3 file itself and scale and display it on-the-fly). This artwork takes up additional storage beyond the MP3 file itself, around 350-400KB per track (not per album).

This is likely where you're seeing the discrepancy between the actual size of the music files (as listed in the "Music" category), and the storage actually being used for the music files on the device.

[Doug Broda]

Gotcha! Now, one last question, if I may... what's the best way to minimize the lost space?

I would think that the best option would be load the songs back into ITunes Library, and delete the art. However, the next step could be one of two things:

A) Take all the available art, manually resize it to no more than the larger of the resolutions the touch uses (320x320, if I read right), then put it back in the MP3.

-OR-

B) If ITunes does it better re total size impact, let ITunes find the art.

Which of those would likely result in less lost space?

[jhollington]

You probably won't save much by resizing the artwork. iTunes resizes the art to a fixed size for its database anyway, so you'd only save a bit of space in the files themselves.

Within the MP3 tag, the artwork is normally embedded as a JPEG image, which is compressed. Unless you have huge album artwork images (say 800x800 or bigger), then chances are that any savings will be minimal.... Of course, even space for an extra album or two can't hurt, but you likely won't get as much as you expect.

Removing the artwork from the tracks, of course, will also reduce the space requirement, but that's a more drastic step, and of course you won't have any artwork on the iPod touch itself.

The traditional iPod models have a checkbox on the Music tab (in iTunes) to decide whether or not to display album artwork on the device. I do not believe the iPod touch has this feature, unfortunately, otherwise you could easily remove the artwork from the device simply by UNchecking this box.

Lastly, the iTunes method of searching for the artwork is a bit more space-efficient, as it does not actually embed the artwork in the files themselves. The upside to this is a size reduction in your actual MP3 files, but the downside is that you won't have artwork if you transfer them anywhere else.

Note as well that if you remove the artwork from an MP3 file that has previously has it, the size is not always reduced, as the header space was already allocated for the artwork. There are third-party programs that can clean this up for you, however.

[Doug Broda]

I think I've got it now, by George. Thanks so much for the education.

(P.S. If anyone has info on the program that cleans up the header space after removing the artwork, please advise -- I have a few files that I am sure have that problem based on initial examination.)

[jhollington]

I think either or both of Tag&Rename (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm) and/or MP3Tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) will do this, although I haven't used them in a while, so I can't recall for certain.