[paulc]

OK, brand new 80G video, have had 2nd gen 20G since it first shipped (i.e. experienced user). Started small, just synced all the stuff from my 20G model. ONLY music. Plus address book contacts.

So the space indicator in iTunes says I have used 18.30G for music (right on the button) BUT 455.2MBs of "other." Now that can be as much as 10 albums. What could this possibly be?

One obvious thing is the address book contents. Can't be that, it has all of 28 contacts. Maybe album art (which I DID run). Can't be that, because I had tons more music in iTunes than would ever fit on a 20G Pod so I made sure NONE of my music had embedded album art. Given the whole new album art method introduced with iTunes 7, I did a run of downloading from the iTunes Store. It's supposed to only have one piece of art for all the songs in an album, thus minimizing the space taken up. Plus I see my "Album Art" folder is all of 58MBs big.

Anyone has a clue what's going on here?

[SSharon]

Firmware, including those shiny new games maybe.

[imitchellg5]

Address Book, Mactracker if you have it, firmware, notes, etc. It can be one of many things.

[paulc]

Thanks for the suggestions, but the mystery deepens. The exact same contents (music plus address book contents) on a 2nd gen Pod shows 63.7 MBs in "other." Also, I doubt it's "firmware" of the built-in games, the "other" figure increments at a reasonably steady rate as songs are downloaded to the unit. I first really noticed it as it went past 100, watched it steadily tick up until loading finished at 18.39G and 455 MBs. I added some video contents and the "other" figure didn't change. I'm suspecting that it's the new, more efficient album covers that supposedly uses one graphic for an entire album; sounds like it's doing one graphic file per song (remember the album art in iTunes is only 58 MBs)!

[pra9ab0y]

Oh if you look in your itunes music folder under artwork you will find a huge file (around the size of your other space on your ipod) part of that other is this file and the code to link each part of the image o each track on you ipod and your itunes library.

[paulc]

Uh, there's no such file/folder in iTunes Music. As I said, one level up in the iTunes folder, there IS an "Album Artwork" folder. It's 59 MBs. If "Other" represents covers, how does 59 MBs become 455MBs?

[pra9ab0y]

Its all the code behind it.

That 59mbs are just covers all linked in 1 huge image file. iTune has the code to link each track with particular dimensions and sizes with that 59mbs and that is all stored elsewher but on the ipod its not classed as anything so it is counted as other.

It is also dumped data(unwanted by the ipod) in that other space.

[paulc]

You might want to dig through your "Album Artwork" folder, there are thousands of files in there! Plus a very extensive folder structure. I think each album has a ~300k xxx.itc file that I think is the actual individual cover file.

Like I said, it SEEMS that the only real explanation for 59 MBs of cover files becoming 455 MBs is that on the computer, each "album" has one image but on the Pod, maybe each song has an associated cover image.

The really surprising thing is that for such a popular item, we really have so little real documentation as to exactly how it works. Notice how all Apple will tell you is that it shows cover art on a Pod?

[pra9ab0y]

It is all one file on the ipod.