Fit more music onto your iPhone with new feature enabled in iTunes 9.1

Did you spot it?

If you’ve got a large music collection and you’re struggling with space on your iPhone, a new feature introduced in iTunes 9.1 could be just the ticket to help you shoe-horn more tunes into your iPod app. Read on for the details.

When MP3 players were first introduced, capacity in terms of hard drive or flash memory space was a lot more scarce and a lot more expensive than it is now, and dial-up internet made downloading music a very lengthy chore, so the bit-rate-du-jour was a relatively low 128kbps. Sneered at by audiophiles the world over, it provided near-CD quality that was perfectly listenable but the discerning ear could definitely tell the difference between it and full CD quality.

So as the cost of capacity tumbled and the speed of our internet connections soared, the average bitrate of audio increased with it – after all, the higher the bitrate, the higher the quality (and consequently the bigger the file). For example, when you buy a track from iTunes today it is encoded at a relatively high 256kbps. At this rate, sound quality is very good but the average 3 minute track takes up somewhere around 6MB of space. When you’ve got 16GB or more to fill this might seem like an awful lot of space for 6MB music files, but don’t forget that we’re sharing that space with music, movies, photos and apps, so before you know it you can find yourself running out of room.

My first MP3 player, a Diamond Rio with a whopping 32MB of storage!

So, until now we’ve had a bit of a catch-22 situation on our hands – do we encode at a lower bit rate to squeeze more music onto our iPhones but suffer a little in terms of quality, or do we encode at a higher bit rate to ensure justice is done to our music library but compromise on the amount that we can fit onto our devices?

Well, iTunes 9.1 has enabled an option that was previously unavailable on the iPhone, and that is to convert tracks to 128kbps as they’re being synced across. What this means is that your iTunes library can remain intact in a high bitrate for enjoyment at home through good quality speakers, but slightly lower quality (and therefore smaller) versions can be copied across to your iPhone. Yes, audiophiles may sneer but chances are that you’re not an audiophile and that in everyday use you’ll barely notice the difference 128kbps and 256kbps or even 320kbps, especially when you’re in the car or walking down a street.

I gave the option a try today and I’m pleased with the results. I previously had 8.6GB of music on my iPhone in varying bitrates – from 128kbps upto 320kbps – and this was shrunk to 6.2GB by this operation. Making the change is easy enough, you simply need to connect your iPhone to iTunes, tick the ‘convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC’ option and hit sync. iTunes did the rest. In my collection there were 922 songs that required conversion and it took around an hour, so set some time aside if you’re going to do this.

If you’re unhappy with the way your music sounds after going ahead, don’t panic because it’s super easy to revert back. All you need to do is uncheck the option and hit sync again and your original quality tracks will be restored.

Great stuff Apple!