help w itunes transfer to ipod touch

[mtbmtb01]

just got a 32gb ipod touch gen 4 that i know nothing about. i'm reading, but thought i'd ask a few questions to put me on the right track. i ripped my extensive collections of cd's with windows media player. i used a mp3 format w a 192 bitrate. it looks like itunes has transferred most everything over from the wmp library. it's about 5000 songs.
when i hooked up the touch, i was going to pick and choose, but it sinced up and away it went. itunes said there was not enough room to do all so i just let it run through it.
setting usage window says i have used 28.3 gb w 27.3gb of music. i only have 255 mb available. does this sound right for a 32gb touch? does this sound like about 5000 songs worth of data or is the bitrate off? i'm using it mainly to play music in the car so i think 192 would be ok, but hate to go lower.
i still have a few cds left to rip. whats the best way to pick and choose what i want to put on there. i had thought about going in itunes and deleted songs i really don't want to try i get the total size down and then resinc and start all over again. is there a better way?
any help for an old windows guy thats doesn't know what he's doing?

[bwh79]

"32 GB" in the branding is referring to 32 decimal gigabytes, or 32 billion bytes (32,000,000,000). This is the actual capacity of your iPod's storage.

In software terms, though, a "gigabyte" refers to a binary gigabyte. 1024 megabytes of 1024 kilobytes of 1024 bytes each. So what the iPod thinks of as a "gigabyte" is actually 1024*1024*1024 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. 32 billion (the actual number of bytes available) divided by this number equals approx. 29.8 GiB (GiB means gibibyte for binary gigabyte, which is what most people outside of the advertising industry mean when they say "gigabyte" or "GB.")

Further, some of this 29.8 is taken up by the iPod's own internal operating software, leaving around 28.5 GiB for user storage.

At 192 kbps, your music should take up approx. 1.5 megabytes/mebibytes per minute of audio, or around 6 MB per 4-minute song. So yes, 5000 songs taking up approx. 30 GB of space is about what would be expected.

If you still want to pick and choose what songs get put on the iPod, your choices are to either manually manage your music (not recommended) or (recommended) sync to specific playlists instead of the entire library. Then you can make one or more playlists that contain what you want on the device, and sync only those lists. When you change your mind about what you want, just change what's in the lists, and your device's contents will be updated automatically each time you sync. For an even smoother experience, read through Code Monkey's document linked in my sig, it will show you how to set up "smart" playlists that will rotate any size music library through any size device with minimal tinkering required on your part, after the initial setup.

[mtbmtb01]

so when i resync back up, will it delete all the files on my touch now and replace them with my new playlist?
what commands do i use to do this?
also where do i go to see what size my playlist is so i don't overlaod it again?
thanks.

[kornchild2002]

Syncing a new playlist will cause iTunes to delete songs on your iPod touch only if they aren't already in the playlist. It shouldn't delete everything and start from scratch in terms of music. There is no specific command to do this. Just plug your iPod in, click on the Music tab near the top of the main iPod window within iTunes, and select which playlists you want to sync over.

A playlist's size is displayed at the very bottom of iTunes. It will tell you how many songs are in the playlist, how long the playlist is (i.e. days, hours minutes, and seconds), and how much space it takes up. You can even construct smart playlists that will be limited by their size. iTunes has a bunch of options for playlists and I don't recommend manually trying to figure them all out. Setup a series of smart playlists that will automatically do that for you and let iTunes sync those instead. It takes all of 4 seconds to setup a smart playlist but it can take hours to manually make a playlist.

[Gadzooks]

If you converted your mp3s at 192, you could check the option to have them converted to 128 AAC files ( click apply too) and that will fit about 1/3 more songs. It will automatically convert them every time they are transferred to the iPod.

[kornchild2002]

Which is not a good idea as that is a lossy-to-lossy transcoding process leading to files that will have much, much, much less quality than the source CD or even source 192kbps files. If someone wants to use a lower bitrate, the solution would be to re-encode the source CDs instead of performing a lossy-to-lossy transcode. It's like taking a picture of a painting and then photocopying it. The resulting photocopy isn't going to be anything near what either the picture or the source painting were.

[Gadzooks]

Good point, kornchild. It is an option, as he should be able to fit more than 5000 at 128.