Songs that you purchase from iTunes and Amazon come in a high-quality, close-to-CD-sounding bit rate: 256kbps. That’s roughly 32KB per second, or 2MB per minute. An album of 60 minutes, therefore, would be around 120MB.

However, my iPhone, even at 32GB, still cannot hold my entire music library. One solution I tried was re-encoding some of my higher bit rate albums at 128kbps, which to my ears sounds great for the majority of my music. The problem is that I now have two versions of the albums floating around in my iTunes library, doubling the space on my hard drive.

What this new feature does is encodes a 128kbps version to your iPhone/iPod directly instead of keeping both the higher bit rate versions as well as the lower bit rate versions in iTunes. In other words, keep your 256kbps in your iTunes library, and only have 128kbps versions on your iPhone/iPod.

After selecting this little checkbox, I managed to squeeze out around 2GB of space, and it cost me nothing but a long wait. Be prepared: if you have a lot of music at higher bit rates, this can take some time. It took me nearly three hours to convert 850 songs on my 2GHz MacBook.

Anyway. Nerdery done. Try it out if you wanna free up some space.

Mark Cuban made a list of reasons why he was glad he switched to the Mac and concluded with this statement, “Im not an Apple fanboy, but I love me some MacBook.” John Gruber astutely noted:

There’s a whole class of recent switchers who define “Apple fanboy” as “anyone who’s been an enthusiastic Mac user since before I switched to the Mac”.

I’ve noticed that for certain, especially with new iPhone owners. These recent Mac/iPhone switchers used to hear the same praising of Apple by other users who were genuinely and legitimately excited about their products before they were. And what did they label them? “Fanboy” or someone who “drinks the Cupertino Kool-Aid” or “would buy a piece garbage if it had the Apple logo slapped on it” or what-have-you.

Fact is, we “fanboys” just really like how Apple has made our lives easier with its products. If you don’t understand that and conclude from my enjoyment of Apple products that I’m a fanboy, then I’m one of ‘em.

Just don’t keep calling me one after you get the bug.

Because it seems to me to be another variant of chronological snobbery. “When you boast about it and I don’t understand you, I say you’re a fanboy; when I boast about it I ‘get it,’ I’m not a fanboy.”