HT4914 Do songs on Match take up hard drive space on devices?

Question

Want to know before I purchase.

Answer 1

Apple's figure for how many songs can be stored on an iPod are based on a song of four minutes in length and encoded (imported) into iTunes at 128kbps AAC format. If your songs are in another format, they could be taking up more space.
Depending on the music you listen to, each song may be more than four minutes (not unusual in this day and age), so simply adding the extra time of each track together will reduce the number of songs you can store. If you import the songs at the higher AAC rate (which is 256Kbps), that halves the number of songs your iPod can store - at a stroke!
So, first of all, what format and bit rate are your songs in? If you've imported them from a variety of sources, they may be in several different formats, so you need to check several songs from different albums before deciding that they are all the same.
To find the bit rate for a song, select it in iTunes and choose File/Get Info/Summary. On that tab, look for the following (my example song in MP3 format):
Kind: MPEG audio file
Format: MPEG 1, Layer 3
Size: 4.3 MB
Bit Rate: 128kbps
and that's for a song of 4 minutes 35 seconds.
One more thing you should consider. If you're buying a Touch (as opposed to a Nano for instance), and your music collection is (let's say) 5GB, you may soon run out of space on an 8GB iPod if you start adding Apps to your Touch. Plus, if you buy any more music on top of what you already have, once again, you may run out of space. So if you're already worried about space on an 8GB Touch, it's probably too small.
Here's another example from my collection, this time in iTunes AAC format:
Kind: AAC audio file
Profile: Low Complexity
Size: 7.2 MB
Bit Rate: 256kbps
and that's for a song of 4 minutes 36 seconds.
So, one second longer, in Apple's AAC format, and also at twice the bit rate, but less than twice the size (7.2 MB).