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iTunes 9.1 can compress your iPhone music and save you space

posted on Apr 6th 2010 at 10:35am by Thomas Wong

[Update: I ended up trying this auto-compression feature out, see this post for more.]

I spent all of my time being scared of iTunes 9.1 that I never realized that it actually changed something for non-iPad users. TUAW has reported a new checkbox on the main iPhone page within iTunes, which allows you to automatically convert files to 128kbps AAC, which is half the bit-rate of most iTunes downloads (256kbps AAC). So if you’ve got a music library with relatively high quality tracks, this auto-conversion could save you quite a lot of space. The sound quality will almost definitely take a hit (it’s unfortunate that you can’ choose the auto-conversion bit-rate), but it’s probably noticeable except on earphones that cost more than $40.00 or $50.00.

I am curious about how much space I might save if I were to do that with my 11GB music library. The core iTunes files on my Mac wouldn’t be touched — just the files transferred to my iPhone. Never mind the fact that I wouldn’t know what to do with all of the extra gigabytes of space, it just sounds like a great idea to free them up.

Anybody tried this out and have some feedback to share?

  • Ron

    My library is pretty mixed between formats, so I thought I'd give it a try. It took a LONG time to sync initially, as expected, but it freed up about 20% of the space on my iPhone.

    I haven't noticed any difference in sound quality, but I'm not a major audiophile. I do like having more space for more music.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/Ragart Thomas

      Thanks for the feedback, Ron. Much appreciated. I'm getting braver by the minute.

  • Rip

    Doesn't it take up more space on your Mac, with the duplicate files though?

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/Ragart Thomas

      Rip, I think it might just cache them and delete them after the sync is through. It would seem incredibly inefficient to keep both files on your comp at all times. Somebody posed the same question on TUAW but it hasn't been answered yet. One easy thing to do would simply be to try this out with a small sample of music and see if free space on your HDD goes down.

  • Angi

    Hello Thomas,
    Yes I tried it. It did free up quit a bit of space for me, my phone was full so I wanted to fit some more music on the good old iphone…I was really scared to upgrade the itunes. After my last upgrade experience (accidental) having to wait for another jailbreak…all the inherant hassle it just didnt seem worth it. but pretty much everyone said they were having no problems with the new version and even saurik tweeted that it was fine. Some people experienced sync issues so i waited, black breeze came out to fix those so I want ahead and took a breath and…tok 2 hours but did it. And guess what? Now I cant sync my jailbroken phone at all, blackbreeze wont open for me (appears to not be a normal exe file) and im stuck. my advice…if jailbroken users want to sync their phones…dont do it. At least until a proven working fix comes out. the new space does me no good cause I cant sync the additional music anyways. :-(

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/FrankCatalano FrankCatalano

    Thomas, I checked it out today. After syncing, it did gave me an extra (1) gig worth of space. It's pretty cool feature if you need the space. I listened to a few songs in a the car and I really didn't notice a big difference in quality. Pretty neat, thanks!

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/FrankCatalano FrankCatalano

    I was hoping you were not going to ask… I own a little over 3gb worth of music. I'm not a big fan of today's music. My music era was the 90's and after that I don't know what happened.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/Ragart Thomas

      Hahahahahah! Well that's fine :P and also tells me your collection shrunk by about 33%. Not too shabby.

  • ritz

    it's nice but it messed up some of my lyrics.. it keeps on loading forever..

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1093623932 John Steele

    I am not entirely understanding this. If I check the box, my music gets converted to something that takes less space on my iPhone, but my Macbook has the original file?

    Doesn't this now mean that my Macbook has the original files + the newly converted? Obviously, I care more about space on my 32gb iPhone than on my 500gb Macbook, but I like to keep my digital things tidy and streamlined.

    Also, if I open up Itunes and let it play through speakers (cheapish) is it going to play the higher quality bigger files, or these new smaller files?

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/Ragart Thomas

      Weird. I definitely responded to this comment via e-mamil, but I'll answer it again:

      your MacBook will only keep the default, higher quality files, although a couple of hundred MB of temp files may be left over. Your iPhone will be the only one that will actually keep and store the lower quality 128kbps aac files.

      You can see my new post (link is at the top of this post) about the whole compression process for the other answers. Hope it helps!

  • Andrea D. Wiener

    Try it – if you're gettin good quality and using the right equipment – the new conversion feature would DEFINITELY work… :-)

  • Pingback: Should you use iTunes 9.1 to compress your iPhone’s music? It Depends. « Just Another iPhone Blog

  • http://justanotheriphoneblog.com Thomas

    Stay away from the button then :) You won't like it.

    • RissaMarieSays

      Okay will do.(:

  • Michael Smith

    it wont work for me when i press it and apply it doesnt do anything