13,000 Songs from Sony and Nothing to Listen to...

"Sony this morning uncrated the latest member of the iPod killer conga-line, a 20-gigabyte device that the company claims can store up to 13,000 songs" according to GMSV. Did you get that - 13,000 songs!

I don't think I've even heard 13,000 unique songs in my lifetime and I'm a singer! But let's say Sony packages this thing with 13,000 unique versions of Louie, Louie done by every mediocre garage band in North America (and probably available on garageband.com). How much time would we spend listening to singers with bad voices?

Let's say an average song length is 3 minutes. So you've spent 39,000 minutes or 650 hours listening to Louie, Louie. Aside from the likelihood this violates the Geneva Convention covenants on the use of torture (which is why we can do this in the USA, since we don't have to keep our agreements), the question is this:

Does anyone want to listen to 650 hours of Louie, Louie? Or even Lifetime's collection of Disco Classics? This is listening 24/7 for 27.083 days, without any respite (that's what headphones are for). If you listen for an 8 hour workday, it would be 81.25 days, or assuming a 5 day workweek, taking off the weekend, you'd spend 16.25 weeks or about 1/3 of the year hooked up to a headset drooling.

And I haven't even calculated the load-in time if Sony didn't preload it for us. :-)

Of course, this 13,000 song number seems somewhat suspicious - this implies 1.53MByte / song (but with fragmentation alone we'll need more space). I've just compared this with some mp3 sizes and they range from 3-7MBytes / song - easily 2-3 times Sony's song size. Perhaps it is the "Chipmunks" version of Louie Louie or even the "Hello Kitty" version of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" they're talking about? Alvin!!!