On iTunes player when I put in a 17 song CD it says it takes up 538 MB but the 75 songs in my library is 328MB

Question

that doesn't add up, why

Answer 1

an audio cd is either 700mb or 80 minutes.

your 17 songs are using the minutes format since you are making an actual audio cd

however if you have an mp3 player and make an mp3 disk then it will go by the MB instead

Answer 2

If you want the songs you import in to your library to take up less space, do this:
Assuming you're using the latest version of iTunes, go to the Edit menu, Click on preferences, then under the advanced tab at the top, click on importing. then click on the "On CD Insert" menu, select Show CD. Then down below, under "Import Using" select MP3 encoder. Then select your quality under the setting menu. A lower number will take up less space per CD, but a higher number will give better quality playback from the files.

Answer 3

I'm guessing the 75 songs in your library are all MP3 files. The songs on the CD are probably WAV files which are much larger. A typical 3MB MP3 file when converted to a WAV file is about 50MB.

Answer 4

My guess is that .cda files (songs on the disc) are uncompressed while songs that you rip from the CD and put in your iTunes library are converted to mp4 files and are compressed down to a smaller size.

Answer 5

iTunes compresses the songs when they go into the MP4 format.