I finally took the plunge and subscribed to another radio show site. One you can download the show in MP3 format and burn. The other one comes in handy packets of 4. 1 per hour of the show. Both are commercial free. No problem in getting those downloaded to a folder and burned to a CDRW.
However this one is only available in the full 4+ hour chunk. It says it’s 54MB, but the 700MB disc is deemed too small. (Now I’m starting to see the error of my ways in the other thread concerning download speed.)
With one show, I can convert the downloaded file in DeepBurner to mp3 audio and just burn the file for play on the DVD player. (I bought a $30 cheapie as the mega-home-theatre-surroundsound technological marvel can’t read mp3’s) :rolleyes:
These new files, though, aren’t recognized by DeepBurner. So I went to Nero. I chose the option of making an mp3 DVD. I tried multi and non-multi session discs. Neither are recognized by the player.
How the hell to I get approximately 4 hours of audio in mp3 format onto a disc that can be read by El Cheapo player that practically buys me a beer anytime I play even a VCD?
I know I’m missing something here. Frustration has gotten the best of me. Any help?
CDs can hold roughly 700 MB worth of data. In that 700 MB, you can fit a little less than 80 minutes of regular uncompressed music. Or, to put it another way, CD audio takes about 8.75 MB of space per minute of sound.
MP3 files are highly compressed and take up much less space. But regular old-fashioned CD players don’t understand the mp3 format, which is different from the raw CD audio data format. It looks like gibberish to them. You need to have special mp3 decoding software to play an mp3 CD or mp3 DVD. Your El Cheapo player doesn’t have one, apparently, so you are SOL.
I ran into the same problem when trying to burn tubular bells and ina gada da vida (whatever those are;) ) for my father. Did a little browsing and seems you can only burn 80 minutes on one cd. I ended up having to burn him 4 CDs.
Are you sure about that? I’d be surprised if anything other than the first file of such a set worked properly; aren’t there headers at the start of the file that define the sample rate and other things?
If you want to slice up a long single audio file, I’ll repeat my frequent recommendation for Audacity - it can very easily perform this task (as well as a lot of other things you might want to do on something you recorded for yourself, such as filtering, trimming silences, editing out advertisement breaks etc).
If you want to fit 3 hours of audio on a single disc, it isn’t going to be a standard audio CD; it could be an audio DVD - oddly enough, there seems to be less software(particularly in the freeware category) available out there to do this than there is to make video DVDs.
Probably what I would do would be to create a video file consisting of nothing more than a repeated black frame, compress this massively (an unchanging black frame should compress down to almost nothing), multiplex it with your 3 hour audio and author it as an ordinary video DVD; just one that happens to have a very dull visual content.
Holy crap – this many replies and no answer yet? Am I missing something?
You’re looking at a 54Mb .mp3 file, right? You want to play it on your DVD player? Your DVD player that reads VCDs and other CD formats?
If so, you’re doing a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
Just stick the .mp3 on a data CD. Don’t muck about with the MP3 DVD options or any of that crap – just select CD-ROM (ISO) and drop the file in the root directory. Make sure you’ve selected “No multisession.” You may as well drop all the other shows in there as well, there’ll be plenty of room for them, and that way they’ll all be on one disc.
I’ve yet to find a VCD-capable DVD player that won’t play an .mp3 disc made this way, whether it’s five hundred little files in seperate folders or a single hours-long mix.
I have hundreds of .mp3 discs of radio programs (mostly from the forties.) Because the bitrate is low on them, and they’re mono, I usually fit between forty and fifty hours on one CD, and they play fine on my cheapie DVD player.
One problem you may run into has nothing to do with the file length, but with the bitrate. I have run across at least one DVD player (a Panasonic) that would only play .mp3s that were encoded at 44100Kbps and above. Very annoying, and something I’ve only seen once, but something to be aware of, anyway. If you are managing to burn the file to a CD and the player inexplicably doesn’t play it properly, that might be the problem. On the off chance that happens, it’s easy to remedy with the above-linked Audacity, which really is a great little proggy.
What’s the make & model of your player? It might be helpful to know – but really, it will probably work fine if you just stick the file on an ISO CD, in the root directory. Most players will navigate through folders on an ISO CD and let you browse .mp3s, too.
The OP already said that the player doesn’t accept MP3s (OK, this may be a misunderstanding based upon failing to get it to play MP3s encoded some way it wasn’t expecting).
Sorry, that was rude of me. Insensitively phrased, that. I meant “The simplest answer hasn’t been given yet?” more or less.
Nah, he said he went out and got a cheap player specifically because it could play .mp3s, as his high-end player didn’t. Boy, can I relate to that. Why is it that the most expensive players seem to have the least features? I have three “el cheapos” in various rooms around the house, and you can be damned sure that they all play mp3s, VCDs, SVCDs, mVCDs, DVDs, .jpg CDs, PhotoCDs, and just about anything else you want to throw at 'em. Didn’t pay more than $60 CDN for any of them.
When it came time to get my mum a DVD player, I didn’t want to cheap out, and got a “Name” player. Just made sure it said “VCD” on the box – so many of them don’t even bother. Set it up for her, and then noticed that half the discs I brought by didn’t work for her. Turns out it doesn’t play SVCDs. So a few months later, after getting sick of re-encoding stuff for her, I pick up another fairly pricey player. This time, I make damned sure it plays SVCDs. Only it turns out that it doesn’t play regular VCDs. So one sits on top of the other one, and has become a dedicated VCD player, while the main one handles DVDs and SVCDs. Divx? mVCD? Forget it. Oh-- and the SVCDs? God forbid you should want to pause or rewind, because if you press any of those buttons, the discs jumps back to the beginning, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it except watch it straight through. And guess who has the one that doesn’t like low bitrate .mp3s? I paid more than twelve times what I paid for the most expensive of my do-it-all machines, and she still doesn’t have comparable functionality. Better picture and sound, maybe – but not so’s you could tell on her average-ish set.
Oops, now it’s my turn to apologise; I misread him as saying he bought a cheapo player that can’t read MP3s :smack: Sorry.
I wonder whether it’s the size of the file; I’m not sure whether MP3-enabled DVD players attempt to load the whole file into a buffer before trying to play it. I’ll fall back to the recommendation to use Audacity to chop up the files into manageable chunks (it will also make sure they’re encoded at whatever sample and bit rate is appropriate).
sigh I was confusing the player I’m using now with another one that I gave to my BIL. This one doesn’t play VCD’s, etc. It will play an mp3 file but apparently only after being somehow converted.
Anyway, what I think I need is some sort of editor. The problem now is, I don’t know which one to use, nor how to use it. I downloaded a trial of Audio Edit, but it seems the intuitiveness of it is somehow lost on me. I’m still experimenting with it, but not sure what results I’ll get.
So allow me to change it up a bit. Any easy to use, or at least clear help files available, editing programs? I have the file, I just need to figure out how to break it up.
Not an endorsement, but I did find this in a few minutes of Googling. It’s a shareware MP3 file splitter. If it works as promised, it may be the solution.
