My smart playlist is much larger than reported

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My smart playlist is much larger than reported

I want to put the contents of a 249 Gb playlist onto a 256 Gb USB flash drive. I drag/drop the playlist tracks onto the drive in the Finder in batches since doing it in one operation chokes the Finder.

The playlist is ordered by Album title while I do this. For some reason, I can't even get through Albums starting with 'M' before I run out of space on the flash drive.

Why would this be given that the stated and reported size of the drive should easily accommodate the playlist contents?

macOS v.11.6

TIA,

David

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.6

Posted on Oct 29, 2021 10:38 AM

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Answer 1

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drschwartz Author

Level 1

51 points

Nov 4, 2021 5:47 PM in response to drschwartz

I figured out what was going on! I'm a bit embarrassed but there were deleted files on the flash drive that I never cleared out of the Trash!!! That cleared up the space I was expecting.

Thanks for your help.

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

274,564 points

Oct 29, 2021 1:06 PM in response to drschwartz

Data on drives is assigned in clusters. Even the smallest file requires at least one cluster to store it. With a large cluster size a large number of small files takes a lot of the space. An estimated 7% free space isn't really going to be enough either. I'd probably want at least 20% free after the transfer.

tt2

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Answer 3

drschwartz Author

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51 points

Oct 30, 2021 12:14 PM in response to turingtest2

I've got two types of files on the flash drive: MP3 Audio and Apple MPEG-4 Audio. I looked at the file size of one file of each type. In each case, it precisely matched the file size as reported by the Music app for each track.

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Answer 4

drschwartz Author

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51 points

Oct 29, 2021 5:06 PM in response to turingtest2

Interesting then that my playlists fit onto my phones so precisely.

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Answer 5

turingtest2

Level 10

274,564 points

Oct 30, 2021 1:56 AM in response to drschwartz

I could well be wrong, perhaps there is some other mechanism at play. You can use Get Info in Finder to check file size and size on disk to see if those are wildly different.

tt2

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Answer 6

turingtest2

Level 10

274,564 points

Nov 4, 2021 6:32 PM in response to drschwartz

You're welcome. We've all been there. 🙂

tt2

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My smart playlist is much larger than reported

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