Ipod Capacity

[Yorkie580]

I'm looking to buy an Ipod, but I'ma bit confused by the storage.

The Shuffle can apparently hold 1000 songs - how would this equate to a talking book? How many CDs worth of a talking book would 1000 songs equate to?

Any help gratefully received....

[Buenchico]

If a song lasts 3 minutes, 1000 songs equates to 50 hours of audio. Assuming that a CD holds around 1 hour of audio, that's (very) roughly 50 CDs of audio books.

However those calculations assume that, when the CDs are 'ripped' to MP3 files, the same level of compression is chosen for the speech files as would be used for songs. You can actually compress speech files considerably more without a significant loss of quality. (Using such high levels of compression would make music lose its 'edge' but the effect is hardly noticeable with speech recordings). So it would be possible to cram several hundred CD's worth of talking books onto an iPod Shuffle.

Chris

[rojash]

Just to add to Chris's answer, Talking books are generally in mono (or if not, can be converted to mono, without detriment). This provides an additional reduction in file size.

I also have to say, that I think you would be much better off with a vanilla mp3 player, rather than an iPod. A great deal of the iPod software and interface is devoted to the classification of music in to styles, moods etc., selecting random playlists and so on. None of this is of any benefit for a talking book (unless you like the chapters read in random order!).

You can buy a vanilla mp3 player or a fraction of the cost of an iPod, and it will give you much better (i.e more suitable) control over what goes where, and how it's classified and played.

[Yorkie580]

Thank you both for your answers - very helpful.