How to create CD's containing MP3's playable on car CD player

[Superhal]

I’ve never ever had a problem with older cd/dvd’s with long filenames.

There is a special file in windows which stores long filenames, but the actual filenames continue to be 8 + extension. For example:

ilikebigbutts.mp3
becomes
ilikeb~1.mp3

[J-P_L]

@mittu

From looking at other older CD players it seems that 12 characters is actually 8 characters plus the file extension. The file extension could simply be implied (i.e. the player treats all files as MP3s as they are all it can play) which leaves you with an 8 character limit for the filename which fits nicely in the power of 2 binary structure.

The manual specifically says that the extension must be .MP3, so yes, the complete name is 8 plus the dot and the extension.

For the record, I’m not very concerned about the issue with the house DVD player, I was only using it as an easy way of testing my CD. What I really want is to be able to use MP3 CD’s in the car and as I mentioned earlier, I got that part figured out.

[Max_Torque]

I’ve made literally hundreds of MP3CDs to enjoy in my car. Usually, I use a program such as iTunes or, in days of yore, Roxio’s Toast on my Mac.

It’s quite easy in iTunes. Create a playlist with the songs/audio files you want on the disc. Organize them however you want, then click the “burn” button. A box should pop up that asks you which drive to use and what sort of disc you want to create; the options will be Music CD, Data CD, or MP3 CD. Pick MP3 CD, and off you go.

One additional piece of info: just about every player I’ve encountered has the capacity to display the ID3 tag information (the information stored in the file itself that contains the artist, album, song name, track number, and so forth) on the front display or TV screen or whatever. However, older players may not be able to read newer versions of the ID3 tags. Every player I’ve encountered can handle ID3 1.1 tags, and newer players can display ID3 v2 and later, which allows a lot more information to be stored. Anyway, if that’s important to you and your player is an older one, you can use iTunes to “downgrade” the ID3 tags on your MP3 files. Select a file or range of files, right-click, and select “Convert ID3 tags…” from the menu.