Chosen Solution
The first time I down loaded music to my ipod it accepted/copied/downloaded 1200 songs but later when I changed my itunes account and added new music to my library it would only take 969 songs no matter how I picked the albums or individual songs. How do I fix it, is this common?
You may have added longer songs or accidentally added a video or other apps that take up space. But you may also have developed some bad blocks as it aged. Kind of like the older I get the less beer I can drink ;-)
Yep. I reckon the mp3s are larger sized, higher bitrate files. The itunes read out should tell you how much memory each type of media is using.