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You will need a blank CD, your MP3 files and software. This post assumes your car CD player supports MP3 disks. If you know how to copy files between directories ("folders") on your hard drive, then you can do this. There are many people who will make it sound like rocket science (or just provide unhelpful answers) but it is not.
You'd collect the files all together in a directory, then write them out in "data" mode to a blank disk using your preferred CD authoring software. DON'T use the built-in CD writing function in most newer Windows distributions since it's garbage, use a real CD authoring application like IMGBURN or Infrarecorder. (K3B is decent but only runs in Linux.) Use ISO9660 filesystem with Joliet extensions, which is the default in most CD authoring programs anyways. (Joliet is optional, but necessary if you don't want file names to be truncated to 8+3 scheme. ISO9660 is required.) Most MP3-compatible CD players don't support any other file systems; a few *might* support earlier UDF versions but it's a gamble. If you want the files to play in a particular order you might want to think about appending sequential numbers to the file names, e.g. "001 Pahie Layo - The Lemon Group.mp3", "002 555-2368 - Mother Bell and the Dialtones.mp3", "003 Chiquita Republic-Atomic Banana Conspiracy.mp3" etc. Once you have that done, follow the instructions for your particular software to build a data CD, then export the whole wad to a disk. The disk you end up with will be a computer CD-ROM that can be run on PCs and CD players with an MP3 codec (including many DVD-video machines) but can not be run on a conventional red book (audio CD) player.
Remember that you can only write between 650-700 megabytes of user data in conventional CD-R media, so take that into consideration. Use CD-R; CD-RW is too unreliable for daily use in abusive environments such as cars, so don't even bother with it.
The advantages are that you can write several hours of audio to a disk (versus 1h 20m in red book format) and you bypass a generation of quality loss since you are playing the actual MP3 files rather than ones decoded using potentially less than stellar (cough cough Itunes cough cough) codecs.
Just use iTunes. I routinely make audio CDs (for car stereos, etc.) using mp3 files on my computer.
1) Buy/use blank "CD-R" type CDs (Verbatim is a good brand)
2) Download/start iTunes
3) Create a playlist of songs you want to put together for your CD (it should not add up to more than 1 hour and 18 minutes)
4) Highlight your current playlist
5) Load a blank CD
6) Skip stuff that shows up on screen
7) Select "Burn Playlist" from menu
8) For type of CD, specify "audio" (then it will play in any standard CD player)
9) Sit back and wait for the CD to be created
10) Enjoy!
Last edited by Thoreau424; 10-09-2018 at 02:04 PM..
WMP and Itunes are GARBAGE. Even for building conventional audio CDs, you're better off using a real MPx-to-PCM decoder like Win-LAME, or the converter in Winamp, and a real CD writer like IMGBURN and assembling it manually. There's really no substitute. A badly-encoded MP3, like any made with the built-in codec in Itunes, will sound bad no matter what, but decoding it through a high-quality codec like LAME can prevent further fidelity loss from demuxing through such lousy codecs. To make a decent quality CD, you have to do a little work. There's no way around it.
But then, I've been doing this for the better part of 15 years so I have a little experience, which is probably 15 years more than a lot of people today. That's why I'm here.
[url]https://winlame.sourceforge.io/[/url]
[url]http://www.imgburn.com/[/url] (NOTE: official distro installs adware; to get around this problem open the installer EXE in a ZIP archiver like 7zip then manually extract the ImgBurn.exe file to your hard drive)
WMP and Itunes are GARBAGE. Even for building conventional audio CDs, you're better off using a real MPx-to-PCM decoder like Win-LAME, or the converter in Winamp, and a real CD writer like IMGBURN and assembling it manually. There's really no substitute. A badly-encoded MP3, like any made with the built-in codec in Itunes, will sound bad no matter what, but decoding it through a high-quality codec like LAME can prevent further fidelity loss from demuxing through such lousy codecs. To make a decent quality CD, you have to do a little work. There's no way around it.
But then, I've been doing this for the better part of 15 years so I have a little experience, which is probably 15 years more than a lot of people today. That's why I'm here.
https://winlame.sourceforge.io/ The Official ImgBurn Website (NOTE: official distro installs adware; to get around this problem open the installer EXE in a ZIP archiver like 7zip then manually extract the ImgBurn.exe file to your hard drive)
Uhh, MP3's themselves are GARBAGE. You can't get something (good sound) from nothing. If it's lossy, it's gone, period. It's called LAME for a reason. You want good sound, use FLAC's. The software you use to make audio CD's from lousy MP3's is irrelevant. I can mention a whole bunch of programs that do it, WMP comes with windows which makes it easier. Why complicate things?
I doubt many people actually use Audio CD's anymore, but if you must and actually own them and want to make a compilation and have it sound good, use WAV or FLAC. Kind of hard to find these formats on the internet for purchasing, assuming you actually bought it.
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