[Built in CD] MP3 disc compilation problem

[swizzler]

I agree that for 'old' recordings (analog) then vinyl is best. Converting analog to digital cannot be lossless. Not so for recent recordings I suggest. Do the theory ... things recorded in digital ... stored in digital (CD) .... and played back on digital equipment has got to be what the artist wants you to hear!?

[Kremmen]

Originally Posted by Jack The Lad.

I have always liked the Beatles too.
and have converted a number of their CDs onto mp3 for the car.
I bumped into Paul and Linda, many years ago.
I was just about to go into an antique shop to try and find a barometer for my Dad and up they pulled in their Roller, to visit the same shop.
Very down to earth they were. If I remember correctly, neither of them had shoes on.

I have heard from a local that Paul used to frequent Rye when he lived in Peasmarsh (may still live there) and used to knock about in an old purple Mini.
His thoughts were that if he tooled about in anything expensive he would be easily recognised and bits nicked. Sound thinking

[civicfan]

Originally Posted by Andiww

I've bought a good CD-RW disc and wanted to create a nice mp3 disc with my favourite music framed alphabetically in 6 folders. I simply burn a CD with those 6 folders using Nero StartSmart. Unfortunately my car's mp3 player says that my first folder on the CD (A-B) is the second one and there is no first folder, so I have from 2 - 7 without the first one instead of 1 - 6.
Why is that so?

The frst folder is the "root" folder, if you leave some tracks in it you will see "1" otherwise not

[civicfan]

Originally Posted by swizzler

I agree that for 'old' recordings (analog) then vinyl is best. Converting analog to digital cannot be lossless. Not so for recent recordings I suggest. Do the theory ... things recorded in digital ... stored in digital (CD) .... and played back on digital equipment has got to be what the artist wants you to hear!?

Probably, but the same "theory" would question the "fidelity" of a car as a listening environment - it may sound spectacular, yes, but not really true-to-life... By the way - the end of all digital tech. is analog anyway - it is us, the listeners

[mike20]

Also, If you use iTunes: iTunes can burn the MP3 CD for you

I have copied my favorite tracks off my cd colection into itunes (I guess they've gone in as aac files), and I'd like to burn them as MP3s onto a CD but when I tried this it wouldn't let me because itunes reckons they are "protected rights" tracks.

Does anyone know how to get around this?

[GHGH]

Originally Posted by spile

Bu vinyl sounds better anyway
(Also a NAim/Linn owner)

Could you recommend a good vinyl-to-MP3 solution? It will be any day now...

[Kremmen]

Vinyl to .MP3 :

Stage 1 - get the vinyl to your PC :

Tutorial: How to copy vinyl records and tape cassettes to your PC - Audiotoolers

Stage 2 - Clean the file

If your recording has clicks and pops then there are applications out there to clean them. I use CoolEdit Pro (now Adobe Audition) but that is very expensive and other, cheaper solutions are available.
Personally I always remove clicks & pops manually as I find that the auto cleaners tend to remove more than required and leave the whole track sounding flat.

Once cleaned you will need to 'normalize' the recording. This is a procedure where the track is scanned and the loudest part is raised to 100% and the rest of the track increased in volume to match. This ensures that the whole recording or set of recordings are all at the same volume level.

Then use either Nero or Roxio to burn all the now cleaned and normalized .WAV files to your CDR as .MP3 which means you need to use the data format. Burning as audio will produce .CDA files and you will only get about 70mins per CDR.

[GHGH]

Thanks!
My wife will not love this!

I've seen a couple of turnables with USB for direct conversion to your PC (plug & play = GH friendly).
Any opinions on the sound quality these produce? I'll bet they won't beat my old Thorens, but anyway this is 192b MP3 files in a car....

[Kremmen]

Most modern HiFi setups no longer cater for turntables hence I think the market for the USB varieties.

If you have a turntable and an amplifier with 'cassette out' phonos then it's cheaper to use that.

2 x phono to 3.5 stereo jack, then make sure Windows recording is set to line-in instead of it's default microphone = proper job!

[GHGH]

= loads of Frank Zappa in the car .
As I said...

[spile]

Originally Posted by GHGH

Could you recommend a good vinyl-to-MP3 solution? It will be any day now...

GrooveMechanic is simple but does a good job.

[congusto]

Originally Posted by mike20

I have copied my favorite tracks off my cd colection into itunes (I guess they've gone in as aac files), and I'd like to burn them as MP3s onto a CD but when I tried this it wouldn't let me because itunes reckons they are "protected rights" tracks.

Does anyone know how to get around this?

Strange... if you created the songs in iTunes from CD's they should not be protected. Only songs that you bought in the iTunes store are.
You will still get an error message though if iTunes converts the CD songs into AAC and you want to burn those as MP3. You can easily check the format by showing the "type" (or something like that, my iTunes is in Dutch, don't know the English term uses in iTunes). Right click on the column heads and tag "type" to do that.
Then select all the AAC songs, right click and choose "convert selection to MP3". If that worked, you can burn the songs as Mp3.

To prevent having to do this in the future, let iTunes convert CD-tracks to MP3 immediately by changing the preferences.

If your songs actually are protected, there is software available to convert protected mp4 (=aac) songs to mp3. Just google on Internet and you will find them for sure.

Peter

[Harlequin]

Originally Posted by congusto

Strange... if you created the songs in iTunes from CD's they should not be protected. Only songs that you bought in the iTunes store are.

Peter

IIRC, iTunes asks you if you want to add content protection to "ripped" music either the first time you run the program or the first time you rip a CD - can't remember which...

I don't remember how to turn it off once iTunes is already installed...

-H

[iamholam]

Just had similar problems with a cd I burned yesterday...

I didn't realise how stupid the inbuilt mp3 cd player really is (stupid is a strong word) but it seems that it only reads the file names in "track listing" view (and even then only the first 10 characters or something) not the ID3 tags that are embedded into the songs. It does read the track information when playing the song though (why can't it just do this from the start?)

Haven't checked for the numbering of tracks although if I have to number all the tracks before burning them in that will be very annoying and you will lose information due to the aformentioned cap on track listing characters!

Not a very good solution if you ask me, my old Alpine CD player worked perfectly with mp3 tracks.

That said though what are the possibilities of Honda bringing out a firmware update for the in car system, fixing these issues (reading id3 tags to organise songs) and maybe improving it? How cool would it be to have album art aswell?