4GB nano only holds 3.68GB...

This is not anything you can fix. Hard drive and Flash Memory manufactureres measure 1GB as 1000 MB. Mac OS and Windows (and therefore their programs) measure 1GB as 1024MB. This means that what you see in your iPod's About section and in iTunes is less than the 4GB you were expecting. Apple also does not directly test their products. They measure 1 song as 4 minutes, encoded in AAC format with 128-bit encoding. I quote directly from the Nano page under the iPod + iTunes tab viewable in EVERY apple page "Song capacity based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; actual capacity varies by content. 1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less." For everyone out there, that means that Apple's famed AAC format, encoded at 128-Kbps (kilobits per second), which is the highest quality, and 4 minutes a song, you can store ABOUT 1000 songs in 4GB. Once the iPod is formatted, it takes on the file system that sees 1GB as 1024MB. That means you can't store as many songs, and if the song is longer than 4minutes, it will be larger and that means it takes up more space. The ID3 tags (what you see when you look at your iPod's screen that shows Name, Artist, and Album while playing a song) also take up a bit of space in the song data. Album Artwork also takes up space and is encoded into the song as well. Ratings, comments, lyrics, ID3 Tags, and Artwork all take up extra space, further limiting the songs you can take with.

It does/can hold 1000 songs, exactly as advertised.
Import them as AAC 128 kbps and keep them at 4 minutes.

but that's why i don't like apples anyway and i have a pc
This statement makes no sense.

You might want to try restoring your iPod, to completely clear it off.

For instructions, see this: Restoring iPod to factory settings

Note that hard drive distributors might state GB size different that how a device reads that same GB size.

This article explains it: How much content will fit on my iPod?


-Kylene

The iPod firmware takes up only ~ 30MB.

A 4GB iPod has 4 billion bytes.
But 4 billion bytes is not 4 GB.
It's two different numbering systems.

See this -> http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60955

"In iPod's About menu, the hard disk size is reported as slightly less than the technical specifications for the iPod. The same is true if you connect iPod to your computer in disk mode look at the info or properties window for the disk.

Why the difference? Most hard disk manufacturers measure disk size this way: 1 MB = 1 million bytes (1000 * 1000). A 4 GB disk, therefore, is one that holds 4 billion bytes. Computers, including Windows computers, Macintosh computers and iPod, measure disk size this way: 1 MB = 1 048 576 bytes (1024 * 1024). The difference in these two calculations is what causes the drive to appear as 3.7 GB on a computer, but actually be a 4 billion byte disk."

it takes some space to have the computer and the ipod connect so the ipod gets so many mbs put onto it so that your computer can load onto it. I had the same question when i bought my 20 gb ipod i only had 18.sometin

the ipod nano uses some of the 4gb to create filesystem structures and to store whatever an 'empty' ipod needs to store, firmware etc.

the '1000 songs' claim is only valid for song files that are a certain average size

if your files are, on average, larger, then you won't be able to fit as many on the ipod

you'll fit more songs on if you use a lower bit rate for encoding, but audio quality won't be as good

sorry, but you are incorrect

the ipod nano has no hard disk, it uses flash memory

the decimal vs. binary size calculation is only applicable to hard disk devices

the 4gb nano has 2**32 bytes of flash memory (actually it has more, the devices used have spare pages), you can confirm this if you check the device data sheets for the flash devices

however, the nano must still emulate a disk within this space, it does this by building the partition and filesystem data structures within the flash memory, this takes up quite a bit of space

The encoding settings for songs you have imported from Audio CD or added to your library from other sources can affect how many songs will fit on iPod. The advertised song capacity of iPod is based on 4 minute songs encoded at 128 Kilobits per second AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). See "iTunes: About Import Settings and Hard Disk Space" for more information. Longer songs and songs encoded at a higher bitrate use up more disk space.

So, it depends on quality and length of songs you put inside actually. You can put thousands of songs which will be only 1 MB size, or you can put only 1 which will "weight" 3 GB 🙂. The 2 GB Nano should be able to handle much more than 120 songs I'd put, but take notice most of them are larger than 10 MB.

As of capacity, the real space is always less than officially stated due to different space counting.

whatever the answer is... you shouldn't adverstise
the nano as being able to hold 1,000 songs when it
only holds about 750. i'm pretty upset about not
being able to hold an extra 200 songs when i thought
i could... but that's why i don't like apples anyway
and i have a pc

What a silly thing to say, the ipod will hold 1000 songs using a differnt format which by the way wont take more than a few clicks of your mouse and then i supose you would sleep better at night, the adverts acctualy do stake the facts its baced on a certain format and song length. would you rather they said it would hold 1200 songs for jeff here who enjoys short songs in a low quality but for derik only arround 700 as he like rather long songs with high quality?
And Apple macs are far better than windows with the lack of viruses and superior technology and the best music player out, and it is a pc! pc stands for personal computer, macs are for you making them personal and there computers! The work you were looking for was inferior windows baced computer. If you hate them that much by a sony mp3 player and wollow in your own disatisfaction.
Oh and to rub it in how stupid you sounded microsoft stole there original windows from mac and then stole the market, id love a mac but they aint cheap and software is hard to find for them.

"Album Artwork also takes up space and is encoded into the song as well"

Depends. When you load album artwork via "get album artwork" in iTunes, its put in a seperate cache of artwork in the default location iTunes/iTunes music/album artwork.

Only artwork you have added directly to the files by some other method is embedded within the music file itself .

no, you are wrong

i've seen the device codes on the flash devices, and i've read the data sheets by the manufacturers of the devices used in the ipod nano

if you had done that you would understand that the ipod nano 2gb has 2**32 bytes of memory (plus spare pages)

don't take my word on it, read the data sheets

the decimal/binary difference does indeed affect all types of storage, the way it does so is this:

semiconductor memory devices are typically specified in powers of 2, so 1K = 1024 bytes

disk memory is typically specified in decimal, so 1k = 1000 bytes

which is why the semiconductor based ipod nano has 2**32 bytes of memory and not the 4 10*9 bytes that a disk based ipod would have

because that is literally the number of bytes that the flash devices used in the ipod nano contain

if you do not accept this then that's your problem not mine, but please do not make untrue claims on this forum

here's the inside of a 2nd gen nano... http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/99/images_large/26.jpg

the flash memory device is the dark rectangular package toward the top-left of the assembly

apple sources equivalent memory from more than one maker, this nano uses one of the samsung K9 family - the K9MCG08UM-PCB0 - characters 4 and 5 of the device code denote size:

8G - 8 gigabits (i.e. 1gb, 2**30 bytes)
AG - 16 gigabits (2gb, 2**31 bytes)
BG - 32 gigabits (4gb, 2**32 bytes)
CG - 64 gigabits (8gb) as seen in the picture

other characters indicate other info, for instance, the "B" in PCB0 indicating that the chip "include bad block" as the decoder, rather enigmatically, states, so good thing it has some spare space

data sheet for some of the K9 devices, including the 32 gigabit/4 gigabyte device for a 4gb nano...

http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/NANDFlash/SLCLargeBlock/32Gbit/K9NBG08U5A/ds_k9xxg08uxarev11.pdf

if you aren't familiar with this type of document, the quickest thing would be to look at the functional diagram on page 9

top right you'll see that the pages have 2048 + 62 bytes, for the "8G" coded part there are 524,288 pages (the AG, BG, CG devices simply scale this architecture up, doubling capacity each time)

so ignoring, for now, the extra 64 bytes per page, that's 2048*524288 bytes

that is 2 to the power of 30 bytes

not 10**9 bytes

back to the extra 64*524288 bytes, these are the equivalent of another 2**14 2048 byte pages, so unless the device has a huge number of bad pages, the ipod's memory will be comfortably larger than 2**30 bytes

just keep doubling the numbers for the 2gb, 4gb, and 8gb devices

um,

No one is debating how flash memory functions.

What you fail to mention in your post (that I am replying to) is that the Flash in the Nano needs to emulate a hard disk, so that any computer it is attached to sees it as a valid storage device.

All the technical explanations you've mentioned are accurate, but they are also pretty much meaningless. When you are using a DoM type of storage system, the Flash memory will behave exactly like a hard drive, and is subject to the exact same Binary vs Decimal discrepancy in the capacity measurements.

A 4GB Nano is 4 billion bytes (decimal 4,000,000,000) of storage... according to the operating system. This is because the operating system doesn't see it as a Flash memory. It sees it as an actual hard drive.
As such, 4 billion bytes to the operating system is reported as about 3.7GB of storage because of the decimal-to-binary conversion.