What is the average song size

A hit song is usually 3 to 5 minutes long. Here's why. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. But where did the "three-minute rule" come from?

History of the three-minute pop song Image courtesy of Flickr Creative commons, Pam Lau A flat record made between and the late s is called a "78" by vinyl enthusiasts and collectors. Has song length evolved with technology? Image courtesy of Flickr Creative commons, Pam Lau It makes sense to assume that since the basis of the three-minute song was the 78 and then 45 rpm single, then songs would become longer as technology evolved. Average song length by year.

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Tools Help. Share This Page. It's not uncommon for portable devices to sport large storage capacities that support dozens of gigabytes of available data storage. This amount of space is ideal for carrying around a good selection of your digital music library along with other types of media files. Although these larger-capacity devices remove much of the challenge of hardware storage limitations, it's still helpful to ballpark the number of songs you can stuff in your remaining free gigs of space.

Most contemporary popular music clocks in between three and five minutes of length, so most online estimators assume files of roughly that duration. However, you may have other things in your collection that can skew your estimations such as remixes or digitized inch vinyl singles. These can be significantly longer than the usual song length—as can be orchestral works, operas, podcasts, and similar content.

The bitrate used for encoding a song has a large effect on file size. For example, a song that is encoded at Kbps yields a larger file size than the same song encoded at a bitrate of Kbps. The encoding method can also affect how many songs will fit on your portable device— variable bitrate files generate a smaller file compared to constant bitrate files.

One reason the VBR vs. CBR question matters is that VBR files generally produce better sound and sometimes result in smaller files if the audio properties of the original sound support it, but they decode more slowly and thus some playback devices cannot handle them.

CBR is universally accepted despite known limitations in acoustic quality. Choosing an audio format for your particular portable is also an important factor to consider. The MP3 standard may be the most widely supported audio format, but your device may be able to use an alternative format that produces smaller files.

AAC, for example, is regarded as being better than MP3. It typically produces higher quality audio and is more efficient at compression.

This format could give you more songs per gigabyte than if you use MP3 alone. Assuming you've opted for the more universal MP3 format for your music library, there's a really simple formula that you can use to estimate how many songs will fit in 1 gigabyte.

This isn't an exact science, but it'll give you a good idea. Take the length of the song in seconds. Then, multiply it by the bitrate of file. Now, take the result, and divide it by the result of 8 multiplied by That will convert from kilobits kb to megabytes MB. All together, it looks like this:. That will give you an approximate size for a single song, but what about a whole library.

Well, you could sit and individually calculate all of your songs, but who'd actually want to do that? Instead, take an estimate. Assume that the average length of your songs is 3.