How many MP3s will fit on a CD?

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Over the weekend I re-did my TJB project. I ripped the CDs into mp3s at 256k. I wasn't able to fit every song on one disk but I had no problem cutting out the few that I don't like. And, flawless playback in my Pioneer. I need to take it into the house and do an A/B comparison with the "real" CDs one of these days.
 
I haven't tried a TJB MP3 disc yet, but am tempted. There are also a few players out there that will take a DVD of MP3 files rather than a CD, which is almost 7 times as much data. You could probably fit the entire A&M output of TJB, solo Herb, Mendes, Bacharach and Carpenters on one disc, and still have room for more.
 
I just threw together another WMA disc with all of Lani Hall's solo recordings, from SUN DOWN LADY up through BRASIL NATIVO. Since I had all of the vinyl-only discs already transferred to CD-R, and I wanted to add all of these songs to my mp3 player, it was easy to do.

Harry
 
Another project completed: getting all of the Carpenters singles tracks from the Japanese Single Box on to one WMA disc.

The challenges: Getting the tracks from 33 mini Japanese CDs ripped. One would think that was fairly easy, just shuffling discs in and out of the computer and letting Windows Media Player rip the tracks into WMA files. But the problems are twofold. One, each track's ID Tag information is in Japanese, so Windows Media Player comes up with boxes for names of tracks, artists, and albums. Two, since each disc has a track one and a track two, that info carries through to the ID tags and file names as well.

So, the procedure to fix that is: put the first disc in the computer's CD player, and go to the "Rip" section of Media Player. There you'll see the two tracks and their timings, but the text for everything is Japanese and comes up with boxes. So you put the mouse over the album title (the first line on the left), right click, and pick "edit". Type in the album name "Japanese Single Box". Click on the second line, right-click, edit, change to "Carpenters".

(It gets easier as you go along). Then click on the first song title of the disc, right-click, edit, change to the title of the first song on the disc to English. Use your down arrow to go to the second title and change that one to English as well. You should see "Carpenters" over in the artist column for the first title, use "Tab" or right-click, edit, to change the second song's artist to "Carpenters".

Now do the rip (I set my rip settings to WMA 192 - you can do this with mp3's or any setting you choose). After the rip completes, go back to your "Media Library" and find the album "Japanese Single Box". It should list your first two tracks. Since these really are tracks one and two, we can proceed to disc two.

Put in the second disc, go back to the "Rip" tab, and repeat the procedure for changing album name, artist, titles and artist. From now on, when you go to change the Album Name field and type in the first "J", a drop down box will appear and you can either cursor down and press enter or select it with the mouse. Same with the album's artist name, Carpenters. Just type in a "C" and choose "Carpenters" from the drop-down box. Fix the titles (this is the longest part), and change the second title's artist to "Carpenters", where again you'll see a drop-down box choice.

Do the second rip. When completed, go back to the media library and in the Japanese Single Box album, you'll see that you now have another set of tracks one and two. Right-click on the newer track one title, and select "Advanced Tag Editor". On the settings box that pops up, you'll see a track number field in the middle. Change the "1" to a "3" in this case, and say OK, and go on to the other "2". Change that one to "4" with the "Advanced Tag Editor".

Not through yet, you now right-click on the new track three, and select the last option, "Open File Location". This will take you to an Explorer box where the actual .wma file resides on your hard drive. Notice that this new track three still has an "01" in front of its name. Use the right-click "Rename" option to change that "01" to an "03". Fast keyboard method is to highlight the track with your mouse, press F2 to edit, hit "Home, Delete, Delete" and type 03. Do the same with the other "02", changing it to "04".

Again, this all sounds horribly tedious, but once you get the pattern down, it goes pretty quickly. I was down to about three minutes per disc cycle, including the actual rip.

So three times 33 discs is a minimum of 99 minutes for this project, just to get the rips done, in English, and sorted in the proper disc order. I did it all in three sessions.

Next it came time to decide how I wanted my WMA disc to be. I could have left the tracks just the way they appear, in order, but that would have put a bunch of Christmas songs in the midst of the regular singles and b-sides. So my method was to create a new folder called "Christmas", and to drag those songs into that folder. Yeah, it's kind of silly having "Merry Christmas Darling" three times in the same folder, so one could delete two of them if you didn't want the repetition.

By having the Christmas songs in another folder, I could now put both folders on the WMA disc, choose shuffle play within the main folder" and not have Santa Claus interrupting the flow.

There's room for much more on the disc, but I decided that this was a full-enough disc for my first attempt at a Carpenters disc. Having every single and every b-side on one disc is kind of neat.

I'm still toying with the idea of a full set of albums, but the sequed tracks just wouldn't come out right. I'm still mulling my options on that one.

Harry
 
Harry,

I know some portable digital players have gapless playback, but I haven't tried it with MP3 CDs. I have two Pioneer players and the Panasonic, along with Winamp on the computer, if I wanted to try it.

I'm tempted to do a few more MP3 CDs, but now my burner isn't working properly. I do have another one upstairs that isn't used much, and might swap until I can afford a new DVD burner (and if that's the case, will probably get one of the new dual-layer burners). This LiteOn drive I have is phenomenal at reading damaged discs though, so I really hate to lose it. Discs that no other player or burner could read, this one works right through.
 
I know I could futz with gapless playback, but really that's only good if you're playing the songs in album sequence. With the "shuffle" or randomizer on, segued tracks just sound jarring. The very first song on the very first Corrs album is a short :30 intro to the second (title) track, Every time either one of those pops up in random on a CD, or an mp3 player, it's just unsettling, taking you out of the music and into the technology.

That's why I wanted to utilize these single tracks, since they're mostly all nicely isolated as individual tracks.

Harry
 
I only had a couple of segue songs on one of my CDs, and yes, it was a bit jarring. Such as, the "Dance On Your Knees" intro to "Out Of Touch" (Hall & Oates). Some of my homemade compilation CDs are cross-faded slightly, but beyond that, most of what I have are single tracks. I don't worry about the gapless playback too much at this point.
 
The Moody Blues would be an absolute nightmare!

Harry
 
Yeah that seems like a lot of work Harry but glad it's worked out into 1 CD for you. I am happy with my 4 CDR's I made from the Carpenters Singles Box Set. It was easy for me cause I used iTunes to convert the tracks into wav files (best possible sound) and since iTunes knew what the songs already were after inserting the mini Cd's it titled them correctly, then once I burned them to a CDR I made sure to use the ID tags. Now when I play the CDR's in my car in dash CD changer and it displays the tracks names on my Nav screen which is pretty cool. Of course I can also play them in the same wav files using my iPod connected to my car sound system using the mp3 connector under the armrest.
 
Isn't it cool to look down and see the title of what's playing? I just love that feature of CD Text with CDs and wished that more used it. The only "official" CDs I have with CD-Text is that SACD of Carpenters SINGLES 1969-1981. Apparently the "specs" for an SACD require that the CD layer use CD-Text.

It's nice that my car player. which does MP3's and WMA's reads those ID tags and displays them on the screen.

Harry
 
Yeah it's very cool. I wish all my earlier CD's had those tags but I have heard that usually only newer CD's have them. I was so suprised when I put in my new Olivia CD (the one available at walgreens) called Grace and Gratitude, when I inserted it into my car (which reads mp3 and tags) it displayed all the titles and since my Nav is touchscreen I can just hit the title and get to that track instantly. I think her CD was made in Canada.

...getting very spoiled with today's technology...
 
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