How many CDs worth of a talking book would 1000 songs equate to?
If a song lasts 3 minutes, 1000 songs equates to 50 hours of audio. Assuming that a CD holds around 1 hour of audio, that’s (very) roughly 50 CDs of audio books. However those calculations assume that, when the CDs are ‘ripped’ to MP3 files, the same level of compression is chosen for the speech files as would be used for songs. You can actually compress speech files considerably more without a significant loss of quality. (Using such high levels of compression would make music lose its ‘edge’ but the effect is hardly noticeable with speech recordings). So it would be possible to cram several hundred CD’s worth of talking books onto an iPod Shuffle.
