w8pmc

I followed the advice of a poster on here & have used I-Tunes Playlist to burn some MP3 cd's.

As a side, i found burning as an MP3 disc or as a data disc made no difference whatsoever, just select either in the burning options & then burn away.

With regard to making the tracks appear correctly on the i-drive screen (not loads of ugly symbols or under-scores), you firstly need to edit the track info for your Playlist tracks. So many tunes are now re-mixes, but the i-drive will NOT display brackets, tracks starting with numbers & other symbols, but instead replaces those characters as an under-score which i personally think looks ugly. So remove all brackets, change tracks starting with a number to starting with a word & remove any other symbols i.e. just have the track name as letters only with nothing else.

You may have to remove stupid long names, again if they're perhaps remixes or the like. Believe me this works perfectly & the i-drive screen looks good. One fact i've not worked out yet is why the i-drive screen displays the track number twice i.e. for say Eric Prydz: Call On Me it reads 115 115 Call On Me. Also not worked out if you can get the artists name displayed, however it's taken me this long to get this far, im just happy my display is not uglied up with odd symbols & under-scores.

browellm

As far as I can see though, there is no support for burning into folders within iTunes.

Unless I am missing a trick?

w8pmc

Sorry, i did not provide full details as i was only really adding to the previous thread (a different poster) which i believe gave more detailed i-tunes instruction.

You first need to create a Playlist, so run through & select all the tracks you want in your car (on mp3 disc) from your i-tunes library then right click on them & click add to Playlist (you may already have multiple playlists, so just create another). Once your playlist is full with up to 700MB (or whatever capacity CD you're burning), right click on the playlist you've just created in the left hand directory (assuming you're using i-tunes in Windows, as i've no idea what the MAC version looks like) then off you go, the disc will be burnt & created.

Make sure before you burn, then you highlight the playlist you've just created, go to Edit at the top, then preferences, then advanced, then burning & check MP3 CD is checked & select a failry low burn speed (i use 4X to be safe). Voila, you've now got a disc.

Also make sure you follow the detail in my original post, if you don't want stupid under-scores & odd symbols on your i-drive screen.

browellm

I wonder if the Mac OS and Windows OS handle iTunes burns differently - no folders are created in the Windows version, they are just dumped on the CD and a number prefix is added to the disc titles.

w8pmc

You've lost me now.

After wasting a few discs, trying different formats & techniques etc. I found by following the above & my original post, you can burn an MP3 CD, using i-tunes/playlists & get the correct i-drive screen format. Not sure what you mean by folders, unless you're meaning Playlists. If not then you don't need folders just the details in the above posts.

I'm using i-tunes on a PC/Windows, not MAC.

browellm

OK, simply if you burn songs in folders on the CD (e.g. 1 folder per album), the folder names will show up in iDrive, and you can navigate to them.

If you burn songs using your method you just get a big long list of tracks with no subdivision. Which is crap.

w8pmc

I understand you now.

However i'm not bothered about the album names, i just want the track names as my mp3 discs are all compilations. One disc for rock music, one for dance & one for more gentle tunes, that way i don't care what album they came from, as my disc is now a compilation of favourite tracks/songs & i can safely assume who the artist is from the track name, plus if i burnt it onto a compilation disc in the 1st place then i know i like that particular song/track

If i want albums, that being dedicated artists per disc, then i'll fire those into the cd changer.

UUronL

If you want to burn into folders, it's a simple as dragging a bunch of folders into your CDR drive in Windows. Windows can be used to burn the CD successfully. The ripping stage is where the application assigns the new filename and and ID3 tagging. Once you have folders full of MP3 files, it won't matter what you use to burn the data CD.


I have never had any trouble, but I too see the duplicate numbering. I think the car is reading and displaying the file name which contains a number, and it is also reading and displaying the "track number" in the tag. For example:

01 - Sucker Train Blues.mp3


That's the filename. The 01 might be the first one we see in iDrive. The tag info is in the image. You can see the track number is a field and is populated with the value "1".



To correct the issue, you would have to rename the files and remove the numerals, or possibly set the ripping utility to -not- populate the track number field in the tag, or edit the tags after the fact with some sort of bulk script designed to strip the track number tag variable from all your files.

w8pmc

That makes sense & a good plan.

I'm gonna be sticking with my regime, as it took 7 wasted discs to work it out (thank god they're cheap nowadays) & i don't care about putting the tracks into artist folders, as my mp3 discs will all be compilations. Took me forever to get all my cd's onto my iPOD, so no intention of being clever & creating multiple designated artist/genre mp3 discs. I'll stick with a disc full of 120 dance tracks, or rock tracks or something else & just compile the compilation as a disc of my favourite tunes from those genres. That way i know i'll like all the music on the disc, rather than just a handful of tracks which is how i feel about most albums nowadays.

Good idea though.

UUronL

I prefer to think of CDRs as vehicles to store 9 to 11 audio CDs. Just in case you ever want to know what it looks like to have stuff in folders, this shows the artist and album title. Selecting one brings up the track listings.