Thanks a lot. This helps me a great deal on deciding what to do next. At first I just thought high quality in itself was important so just made a lot of 320kbps songs and the 1GB was full at 120 songs. Then I read that WMA might be better but after this post I read a whole lot of forums and reviews and it seems mp3 LAME may be at least as good. 128 to 192 is usually recommended but this time I make from CD on WMP11 a 64, 128, 192 wma and 128 and 192 mp3 and using the buds darned if my non-audiophilic ears could tell any real difference. All sounded just as good. But I dont think i will go down to 64 based on one song. I will probably leave the player like it now is but make my future music MP3 128 or maybe a VBR that includes 128. I am a casual listener and dont plan to need any more than the earbuds supplied. I have lots of CD-R I made a few years back from mp3 files before I knew anything about other formats. I had a hunch that mp3 would be more useful and recognized more widely by machines. I am also rather theoretical oriented so I would feel better going with 128 that 64 or lower even if I really could not tell the difference. My test song was 3 minutes long and the files were1.58, 3.15, 4.71 MB for the wma 64,128,192 kbps. And 3.11, 4.68, 7.80 MB for the mp3 128,192,320 kbps. So even going 128 I can get many more songs on without really hearing much difference in quality, which suits my needs.
I like to put them in there by naming Album and Artist and Contributing Artist the same and leaving the track number in filename so it stays in order of tracks instead of going alphabetical and not in track order. Then I copy the Artist folder with songfile to clip. Even so, WMP11 has its own ideas about file and folder names and it was a big learning curve to figure out how to defeat it, which I never did completely accomplish. Some things I still have to rename several times after. But I like to have all the artist folders under artist and the next level down all the songs in that album. Still get some that come up Unknkown though even though I named and renamed them. Seems to have prior knowledge of a disc or a track I cant change. But i have had the 1 GB 2 weeks and the 2GB 1 day and I am very much satisfied with the device, its performance, and the price. Just discovered the forums the other day.
