MP3 cd in car stereo

Question

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this question, so if it isn't feel free to move or delete it.

I just burned an MP3 cd (let's call it CD 1) with about 80 songs on it, and it plays fine on my computer. When I put it in my car, though, only some of the songs play. The songs all started out in different formats (AAC, Protected AAC, Purchased AAC) but I converted them all (in iTunes) to MP3s ('MPEG audio file').

I burned them all to a cd in iTunes (MP3 CD, 8x speed, just to be safe), and when I put it in my car, only some of the songs play.

Strangely, I did the same thing with another CD (CD 2) and all of the songs played. Each cd had some songs imported from CDs and some downloaded from iTunes. Just to check, I made another copy of CD 1 and tried that in my car, but the same songs didn't play.

It's a 2006 Hyundai Sonata, if that matters.

Any ideas why only some of the songs, but not all, would be playing?

Edit: I have two different songs, both at 192kbps. One plays and one doesn't. Another set of songs have different kbps, but both play. So I'm pretty sure that's not the problem.

Answer 1

I had the same problem. Based on some suggestions in other forums, I tried five easy things. One or more of the changes I made did fix the problem. Here are the things I tried:

1. Deleted all of the album art from the song files. Do this in a separate folder with copies of the songs, not in your primary music folder on your computer! Otherwise you will lose your album cover art (if you care about that). I suspect that this is what fixed the problem. I use the free version of Winamp and it was easy to do from there.
2. I also deleted the v3.2 tags (ID3v2) from the song files. Also easy to do using Winamp. Make sure the v3.1 tags are there or the info won't show up on your car stereo LCD.
3. Burned at 16x instead of 40x. This is the slowest setting available to me using my burning software.
4. I removed the playlist file from the burn folder before buring the CD.
5. I used a Memorex CD instead of OfficeDepot.

Answer 2

In my case (Jetta 2007), MP3s encoded in VBR (one of the albums I bought from Amazon MP3) will randomly fail with "Err Title". Very irritating. You can check whether an MP3 is encoded in VBR by right clicking on the track in iTunes and then choose Get Info. The info screen will have Bit Rate field, and VBR will be shown in parentheses if the MP3 is encoded in VBR.

Answer 3

Try scanning the mps3 on the CD using a validator such as http://mp3val.sourceforge.net/

In addition, many devices have a nested directory limit (such as 2 or 3 deep max), very specific rules about acceptable file names, and potential problems with extended ID tag formats. You might try stripping any album covers and/or inspecting the ID tags for any odd characters (especially punctuation and/or accents) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3tag ).

I would do this on temp copies, not on the original files. You also have the benefit of knowing a few specific files which fail, so you can scrutinize & manipulate copies of those for clues.