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How to Double Your Old iPod's Storage Capacity

by Tim Stevens on September 7, 2007 at 12:14 PM

Shrink Your (non-AAC) iTunesIf your iPod is full, Apple would happily take your money for a newly announced 160 gigabyte iPod Classic, which is big enough to accommodate a ridiculous 40,000 songs. But at a price point of $349, it's not exactly an impulse buy. Enter ShrinkMyTunes, a $40 software program that re-encodes your iTunes collection to cut file sizes in half and, as a result, double the capacity on your iPod. Reviewers over at Wired put the software to the test and liked what they found.

Both iTunes and Windows Media Player, along with other media management apps, will let you tweak the file size of your songs to squeeze more or less content onto your player. The trade off, of course, is that smaller file size results in lower sound quality. ShrinkMyTunes, however, does a much better job than other programs, drastically reducing the quality in sections of songs where little is going on then boosting it again during the important bits. The result is significantly whittled down file sizes for tracks, which according to the Wired test, generally don't sound all that different from the originals.

However, there are a number of drawbacks. Our first problem with ShrinkMyTunes is that it only runs on Windows at this point, making it a non-starter for Mac fans. The next shortfall is that it only tackles unprotected MP3, MP3Pro and WAV files. So, the software won't do anything for those protected AAC files you got from iTunes or the WMAs downloaded from something like URGE or Napster (the new-fangled, legal Napster, that is).

Thankfully, ShrinkMyTunes is currently working on an update that will allow the software to work with unprotected AAC and WMA files. A Mac version is also in the works, so don't go ordering that new giganti-Pod just yet.

ShrinkMyTunes is available on the company's official Web site, Amazon.com and will soon be stocked by Office Depot.

From Wired

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Tags: AAC, iTunes, Mp3, WMA

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