Stop asking me how many songs it can hold

The average person doesn't understand file compression and quality.

I could rant for a week or more about how this relates to graphic design and print production - but this is a music blog, so I'll reign myself in a little.

This is all Apple's fault. Using "how many songs" their players can hold as a selling point, because it's not enough to say "this thing has a 120gb hard drive in it." That's too confusing, apparently.

But at least it's honest.

By their logic, if I want to get the most out of my mp3 player, I should compress all my songs using 32kbps encoding. That way, they'll be incredibly tiny. Why, I could store 100,000 songs! Metrics are king, right?

The problem is, the number of songs a storage device can hold is highly dependent on how the audio is compressed. Not to mention the length of the song. A lossless copy of Funeral For A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding is going to be a hell of a lot larger than a 128kbps mp3 of It's Time To Party.

Let's lose the "number of songs" statistic already. If you already have the songs on your hard drive, it's really quite easy to figure out how big your collection is. Then, you get the mp3 player that best fits you.

And whatever you do, please don't over-compress your audio just to save space. You can't get those bits back.