How Much Fits on an iPod: How Much Music Does the iPod Touch Hold and Other Questions About iPod Storage Space
A Breakdown
The iPod Touch, like other iPod models, is a vessel for the type of content you want to sync and save to it. Audio, video, photos, apps and other content make up the bulk of the experience that you have with your device, and the amount of storage space will allow the diversity that you want out of this content. The iPod Touch comes in a variety of sizes and each one has different limitations. If you are wondering how much music an iPod Touch holds, how many movies can fit on one or if there is a concrete number of apps it can contain, here is a look into how this breaks down for users.
Looking at Storage Space
The iPod Touch does not come in a universal format, but the amount of space that is allowed in the iPod Touch reflects universally across all models. This means that the amount of storage per GB is the same for all models of the iPod Touch, even though the older models offer fewer or different features than the newer ones do. They all use the iOS as the firmware. All have similar functions, permanent apps such as Safari and the same basic elements.
There is, unfortunately, no way to give a concrete answer about the media that you are using. Though many people purchase music from iTunes that has a standardized format, many tracks that are shared are different and have different size ratios. Likewise, movies and music all come at different lengths and inherently different file sizes. When you are wondering how much music an iPod Touch holds, the answer is only going to be an estimate and cannot be concrete.
In general, you can know that the iPod Touch is not quite as space effective as other types of iPods since the iOS takes up so much space. This actually breaks up to being about 700 MB of your total iPod storage space, which is similar to the way that computers work in combination with their operating system. On an 8 GB iPod Touch version, this would end up meaning that there was only 7.3 GB available for content.
How Much Can Fit
The most basic version of the iPod Touch, which was the eight GB version in older models, can hold an average of 1,750 songs. It can also hold 10 hours of video and 10,000 photos, but these numbers are only true if you isolated the iPod Touch to just these items. The 16 GB iPod Touch doubles this at 3,500songs, while the 32 GB version doubles that number and holds about 7,000 songs and the 64 GB model does a final double at 14,000 songs.
The same is true with video, as the 16 GB model can hold 20 hours of them, the 32 GB version can contain 40 and so on. It is more difficult to break down the number for movies to a concrete answer as the list is given based on hours and not individual files, but you can easily break this down to average movie or television show length.
One of the less taxing elements of the iPod Touch is the apps themselves, which are relatively small and take up comparatively little of the storage space for what they are able to do. This is even more difficult to determine than media as they each have their own size, and this can be a huge range.
How many apps an iPod Touch can contain really depends on the types of apps. Some people put the estimate at around 129 per eight GB of storage space, which is more than you will be able to show on all the available pages. This means that you will have to use Searchlight to find some of your apps.
This has a huge variability, and if you have apps that are difficult to download via Wifi because of their size then you will likely be allowed fewer apps. Large-scale games often take up much more, which can indicate games that you have to purchase from real developers.
When you are determining how many apps on your iPod Touch, start by deciding whether this is going to be used mainly for games, business, contacts or utilities. This is really going to help you to figure out how much you can expect to put on there, but it is always easy enough to delete the ones you no longer use and replace them with new apps.
It’s difficult to break down the movies number to a concrete answer as the list is given based on hours and not individual files, but you can easily add up the lengths of the movies and see.
References
- EveryiPod.com, iPod Q&A, http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/ipod/ipod-faq/how-many-songs-does-ipod-hold-capacity.html
- Screenshots by Shane Burley
This post is part of the series: iPod Touch Questions
Here are articles that answer important questions about the iPod Touch.
