I'm sure this is not the precise forum for my question, and I certainly don't want to offend anyone with a belligerantly misdirected post, but my hydrogenaudio friends are most knowledgable and trustworthy, so maybe someone can help me out, or help me get help elsewhere.

I just bought a 1gig ipod nano. I took several albums (ripped via EAC to flac) and used foobar to compress them to mp3. Then I noticed the size of all the songs far outweighed the ipod's advertised "500" songs. Ahem. What I mean by that is, 150 or so mp3's is about 1 gig....so where does "500 songs" come from? Should I be converting my flac's directly to AAC?

I know due to formatting reasons or what have you, you'll never achieve max capacity, but i would like to get more than just 150 or so songs. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Lower bitrate = Smaller file size. Use more compression. (like V5 --vbr-new)

http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/
1GB Nano is advertised to hold 240 songs ;
Song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding

[edit] - Bitrate is the key, not the codec. 128 Kbps AAC is basically the same size as 128 Kbps MP3
rough estimation:
128,000 bits x 240 seconds = 30,720,000 bits / 8 (bits per byte) = 3.84 MB
3.84 MB per song x 240 songs = 922 MB

You might want to return your iPod Nano (if you just bought it) and wait until Tuesday, when Steve Jobs is planning a major press announcement. Rumoured (see macdailynews.com or macrumors.com) are new iPods, including new cheaper, larger capacity iPod nanos. That way you can hold more songs (MP3 or AAC) on your iPod. Cheers!

I'd give the 96 Kbps [b]VBR[b] setting in iTunes a go. It seems to average around 105 Kbps VBR. Which means you'd be able to fit about 330 songs, assuming they are around 4 minutes each.

The quality won't be as good as the default 128 Kbps AAC setting in iTunes, however it is still very good for such small sized files.