Tuned Up

This has without a doubt been the year of Apple. This is due in part to the much publicized iPhone and the launch of the new iPod Nano. It wasn’t long ago when 8GB or 16 GB was seen as more space than we knew what to do with, but 8 GBs is a starter kit in the day of the 160 GB music player. For those of you that have not made the pricey leap to the land of larger capacity music players, you can still get more out of your music player.
MP3’s are the compressed form of other audio formats like WAV files. Now you can compress the already compressed MP3 files. This means that you can fit more music files onto a music player. Websites like shrinkmytunes.com offer software that they claim can reduce MP3 files up to four times smaller. This can be a viable option to buying a new larger capacity music player or hard drive. The ability to upload 3 GBs or 4 GBs of music onto a 1 GB music player is definitely worth the $40 cost of this compression software. The downside to this software appears to be that it only compresses MP3 and WAV files. This means that if your collection consists primarily of songs downloaded from iTunes, which are ACC format files, then this won’t help you.
Once you have shrunk the size of your music files, the next thing is to remove duplicate music files. Duplicate music files are another consumer of unnecessary space on your hard drive or music player. If you use iTunes, you can look in the Edit header and find Show Duplicate Songs in the menu that appears. The songs should be grouped together by song title and the artist. Next, you simply place your mouse pointer over the duplicate song that you want to remove and click the right side of the mouse. Select Clear from the list that appears. I like to check the size of the file and the playing time of the song to verify that it actually is a duplicate. Another option for removing duplicate songs is to go to your iTunes library and sort it by title or artist in alphabetic order and remove duplicates this way. Sometimes the title of a song could be misspelled and it won’t appear on a Show Duplicate Sings list. This method of checking for duplicate songs is both thorough and time consuming.
After you have your iPod and iTunes looking lean and mean, you can export your music out of iTunes. A free program called Export ITunes offers you this option. You can assemble a playlist using iTunes and export it to another device to be played on a music player other than an iPod. The ability to export your music out of iTunes means that you have options if your iPod is broken or you don’t want to deal with Apple anymore.