Honey, I Shrunk the MP3s

The new iPod Class ics sport a ton of storage - 160 gigs to be exact; about 40,000 songs, give or take a few grand. For a few people, that still might not be enough. Here's the solution: ShrinkMyTunes. This new commercial app compresses your songs even further, often twice as much , with no appreciable loss in quality - so you can squeeze off roughly a third of a terabyte from an iPod classic, and listen to 80,000 songs. That's roughly 7.5 months of continuous listening with no repeats, if my math is correct. It's relatively tiny - a 2mb app, and has no frills to speak of: only two setti ngs are available - Better Compression, and Better Quality. I t uses a NASA-designed algorithm ("content sensitive heuristic optimization algorithm") that trims off excess and redundant sound, and adjust s sound quality downward so that it compresses better, without unduly compromis ing the music. If you can live with it, it'll at least double your storage. Thi s'll be great for the legions of 8gb and 4gb iPhone users, shufflers and for the coming horde of 8gb and 16gb iPod Touch users. It works for most MP3 players, not just the iPods, and maintains all the tags a nd info after conversion, which averages about 30 seconds per song. You get 2x compression in most cases, 4x in others, like audiobooks and spoken word files. There are gotchas, though: only works for MP3 and WAV files, is audio-only, and worst, it's for Windows on ly for now. AAC and Mac support coming within the year, don't worry. US$39.95. Here.