Here’s a quick tip on how you can save space on your iPhone with iTunes version 9.1 or later.

When you perform a sync of your iPhone to your Mac or PC, look at the first tab of iTunes and you should see this on the lower half of the screen.

Select the 3rd checkbox that says “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC“. When you next hit sync, iTunes will convert songs of a higher bit rate to 128 kbps AAC format on-the fly and dumps it into your iPhone. Your mileage may vary depending on how many higher bit rate songs you have in your iPhone. It worked very well for me, giving me back about 7.58 GB worth of space for more songs.

Caveat Emptor:

• If you have a lot of songs, you might want to leave the conversion and sync it overnight, like I did.
• Plus if you have a Genius playlist or Smart playlist that constantly changes the songs in there, remember the time it will take for these new songs to be converted as well!
• For the audiophiles, the loss of bitrate will cause loss of quality – but probably 80% of the iPhone users ain’t audiophiles and won’t notice the difference, like me.

Update: For those whom like me had updated iTunes to 9.1.1 once it was released, and had tried this setting, you might find that your iPhone constantly re-save some songs during sync, lengthening your sync time. It is possibly due to a bug in an earlier release. To fix it, just go to Apple’s iTune page to download manually and install over the existing iTunes – it should be fixed.

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