ipod disk usage

[agila]

although i am thrilled about my ipod and brag abou tit constantly, i am a little disappointed that its 20GB disk is getting full.
in itunes i get the size of my music library to be
14.2 GB.

my "20 GB" ipod (which only holds 18.5 GB... why is that?) tells me that the music library on it is 17GB. there is no data on the ipod, just music.

preparing for a party this weekend i created a large playlist in itunes, solely out of tracks that were already in my music library (on the ipod as well), then i plugged the ipod and was disappointed to see my ipod disk space decrease by .5GB! the ipod seemed to be copying the tracks themselves over, not just a list of tracknames, as i thought.

is this normal? it just seems stupid to me.

--
agila.

[agila]

on a whim i just tried deleting the big playlist. and updating the ipod.
nada! it is still loaded with 17GB. i didn't even blink when i clicked update. updated immediately
so i tried creating a huge playlist and updated the ipod. and it still sits at 17 GB. again the music library is only 14.12GB. i don't understand where those 3 GB went...that plus the 1.5 lost since the ipod is only 18.5 GB adds up to 4.5GB less space than advertised. almost one fourth!
maybe i should restore...

[carouzal]

You will never find a hard drive with as much space as the label says. It is because of the formula they use to come up with the size.

1Mb in the real world is 1,024Kb in the HD world 1Mb is 1,000Kb.

Those numbers may not be exact but that is what is happening.

As for your your iPod problem Im not sure.

Jim

[bassi]

This may seem obvious, I'm sure you've already thought of it.
If you manually manage your iPod, if you delete a playlist you also have to delete the songs from the library of the iPod to free up the space. I'm not too sure if this is true for the "update playlist only" preferences and others but it's worth checking out.

I concur on carouzal's post. Read the fine print on their iPod blurb.

[agila]

hi guys and thanks for replying.
i suspected as much, but there has to be something more to it than that, since apporximating 1000 when you really mean 1024 has an error of 2.4%. when you buy 20GB and get 18.5GB the error is of size 7.5%.

i think i finally found the answer over here:
http://support.gateway.com/s/HARDDRV/Shared/Other/hddsize.shtml

the apple blurb only says:
1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.

i wish it indicated how much less you should expect. even if only in the very tiny fine print. but i think i got it now, thanks again.

(i still don't understand the discrepancy between the music library sizes, though.)

[agila]

after a complete "restore" by the latest installer, my ipod is now back to comparable size as my music library. 14.6 vs. 14.12 GB. odd. and I could create a big playlist without