itunes taking up too much memory

[mmichelson]

My husband and I just decided to switch our ipods - giving me the ipod mini (the smaller of the two). As we started copying playlists from my itunes, latest version 6.0.1 (3), onto the ipod mini, we discovered that identical playlists were taking up literally 10 times the amount of memory in my itunes than his. And this went for all the music in my itunes. I have 750 songs in my itunes, the equivalent of 2 days of music, taking up 22GB. My husband has 530, again the eqivalent of 2 days of music, taking up 2.64 GB. Is there any explanation for this? Fix?

[hayne]

I don't know what would cause this but I would recommend doing a "restore" on the iPod - this will erase all songs and restore it to factory state.
See the Apple docs listed in the sticky thread at the top of this forum section.

[chutem]

is thre a possible encoding difference here? For instance are yours aiff and his mp3? This would explain the huge size difference in iTunes.

[tlarkin]

is thre a possible encoding difference here? For instance are yours aiff and his mp3? This would explain the huge size difference in iTunes.

aiff is still a compression format, and it is somewhat compareable to the size of MP3s. I would find it absurd for nearly the same amount of songs, but mp3s take up 1/10th the space?

You probably have duplicated your library somewhere, or something isn't registering right. I would first start looking into itunes preference files, and then see if you have a duplicate library somewhere. Also, how many HDs are in your mac? Do you have an external fw drive with music on it as well?

[voldenuit]

1/10 against Apple Lossless, WAV or AIFF sounds about right.

Tell us more about the encoding of the songs before assuming something went wrong.

[chutem]

Hmm...I thought that Aiff is the format macs use for uncompressed files as listed here (http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/ISEO-rgbtcspd/learningcenter/home/fileformats_glossary.html). Which is why one can burn many fewer aiff files onto a cd vs the same as mp3. I agree it is absurd that the same library would take up different amounts of space all things being equal, but not if one is encoded differently (apple lossless, wav or aiff vs. mp3) than the other. Also I have my itunes library duplicated in about 4 different places and it is always the same size. It seems to me that encoding is an obvious thing to look at.

[Simpsonianbanana]

Wait, how are they the same playlist, if they have different amounts of songs in them?