There was a discussion a few months ago regarding how MP3 CDs work. I made an MP3 CD today and it worked very well. I use iTunes and have about 2000 tracks in MP3, AAC and Protected AAC format. Of course, to use MP3 CDs you must have the PCM feature. Here's what I needed to do:
1. Since I had hundreds of files that are AAC, the first thing I needed to was to convert them from AAC to MP3. I did not want to have duplicates in my iTunes library so I decided to copy my entire library to a second computer which will now be my MP3 library.
2. I found a program called iTunes-LAME (for Mac OS X) which handles the AAC->MP3 conversion. It did a great job and even takes advantage of dual processors.
3. The Protected AACs are even more of a pain. To be able to use these as MP3 files requires that you first burn an audio CD and then rip the tracks as MP3. Obviously, you are going to be losing sound quality in doing so. However, we have no other choice unless Porsche decides to support protected AAC files. When I ripped the audio, I did so at the highest quality so that at least the resulting MP3 files would sound as good as possible. This of course means they have larger file sizes.
4. Go to iTunes Preferences, change the burn type to MP3.
5. Make a playlist and burn it.
One issue I found is that if your CD title contains spaces, they are extracted when the MP3 CD is displayed. Tomorrow, I am going to try using underscores to give a little spacing between words.
I've had a few tests with MP3 CDs in my car. The results are good and bad.
First good thing is that it WORKS! The othergood thing is that the player does read ID3 tags from the mp3 files... HOWEVER, the bad thing is thatit doesn't use that information toorganize the mp3s. The MP3s are displayed on the PCM as a list offiles within folders... and the track names are simply the file names (without the .mp3 extension) as opposed to using the information from the ID3 tag... The only time you see the ID3 tag info is when a song is playing and then the information is displayed on the screen.
So after a few trials, here's my advice on how to burn mp3 CDs to play in your car
1) CD name is not important. I've not seen that displayed anywhere.
2) It's best that your files are called something like 'XX Song Name.mp3 ' where XX is the track number and Song Name is the track title. (iTunes does that automatically, so shouldn't be a problem)... but MAKE SURE that the files aren't called something long such asArtist Name - Album Name - Track Name.mp3. This way all you'll see on the screen is a repeat of the Artist Name - Album Name (if you're lucky)... there's no way you'll see the Track Name cos the file name is too long to display all of it.
3) Store them in folders (don't leave a bunch of mp3s on the root directory of the CD).
Here's a typical CD structure
-ROOT
-- ALBUM ONE
---- 01 TRACK NAME.mp3
---- 02 TRACK NAME.mp3
---- etc
-- ALBUM TWO
---- 01 TRACK NAME.mp3
---- etc
and so on... ofcourse replace ALBUM ONE with the name of the album and TRACK NAME with the song title.
This worked for me.
Zuksh
