Assessing the Size of Your iTunes Library and How Much Disk Space Your iPod Has

In order to determine how you are going to manage the music on your iPod, you need to understand how large your music collection is and how much storage space is available on your iPod. This information will determine the way in which you build and maintain your iPod music library.

Determining the Size of Your iTunes Library

You can determine how much storage space you need in order to move your entire music collection in just a few steps. Open iTunes. Choose Library in the Source List. With the Browser open, select All in the Genre or Artist column. The iTunes window will show all the music you have placed in your Library. Look at the Source Information area at the bottom of the iTunes window (see Figure 5.1). Here, you will see the number of songs, the total playing time, and the disk space required to store all the music in your Library. The number you should be most interested in is the disk space required because that is what you use to determine if all your music can fit onto your iPod's disk.

Figure 5.1. At this point in time, my Library required 10.06GB of disk space.

Determining How Much Storage Space You Have on an iPod

You have two ways to determine how large the disk is in your iPod.

One is to refer to the documentation that came with your iPod, or perhaps you can simply remember the size of iPod you purchased. At press time, the possibilities for new devices were about 4GB for an iPod mini and 15GB, 20GB, or 40GB for an iPod. (Older models of the iPod can have 15GB or 30GB disks.) This method is easy and provides a pretty good estimate of the room on your iPod's disk.

Note

Apple has periodically updated the iPod with larger and larger disks. The original iPod had a 5GB disk and was the only model available when it was released. Now, you can choose a size that best fits your needs and budget.

If you can't remember or want to determine the iPod's available disk space more accurately, you can get this information directly from the iPod itself. To do this, choose Main menu, Settings, About. On the resulting About menu, you'll see the capacity of your iPod's disk (see Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2. This iPod mini has a disk capacity of 3.7GB.

Tip

You can also get information about the status of the iPod's disk by connecting it to your computer, opening iTunes, and selecting the iPod on the Source list. Just above the iTunes Source Information area, you will see information about the iPod's disk, including used space and free space.

The capacity shown on the About menu is the amount of storage space available for your music. Some space is required to store the files needed for the iPod to function. This is the reason that the capacity you see will always be slightly less than the rated size of the iPod's disk.