Albums not playing in a car MP3 CD player?

[Bismarck]

I've been encountering this problem for a while now. Many of the albums from OCRemix fail to play in my car's MP3 CD Player. Those affected include Nights: Lucid Dreaming, Sonic: Sound of Speed, Pokemon: The Missingno. Tracks, Essence of Lime, and Heroes vs. Villains.

Some albums have a handful of songs that will work, such as tracks 3, 4, 7, and 11 from disc one of Nights. However, many albums fail to play entirely, including Heroes vs. Villains.

What makes the problem so difficult to pin down is that everything from the main remix listing on OCRemix plays without a problem in the car, including tracks posted from albums that would otherwise not work. Also, every track, even those from albums, plays perfectly on my computer. Hence, I don't think the problem lies with the CDs or the player.

If it helps, the car is a 2007 Ford Focus, but I don't know the brand or model of the MP3 player it uses. The CDs are Memorex 52x, 700MB, 80min CD-Rs, and the program I use to burn the CDs is Windows Media Player.

I would greatly appreciate any advice or suggestions on how to fix this problem. Thank you very much in advance.

[The Damned]

I ran into this problem with a co-workers car stereo that used CDs to play MP3s, and both the car and the player were from 2007 as well.

What I finally figured out (by simply reading the stereos manual) as that it was only designed to play 128 bit MP3 files. Any file that was higher or lower wasn't supported by the player.

I noticed that a lot of OCR and album files are different bit-rates (some are 128, some are 160) and some of them are variable bit-rates (or VBR) which change depending upon the section of the song.

If you have a similar player, that's most likely the problem. It's a stupid, stupid design choice, seeing how there is no set standard for bit-rate, and there were tons of devices made before 2007 that did support different bit-rates. My guess is the guys that designed the player were idiots that didn't know about anything other than 128 bit-rate files.

[Eino Keskitalo]

I guess you could get around this problem by downloading flac versions of the albums, decompressing them into wavs and making 128 kbps mp3s out of those yourself..

--Eino

[The Damned]

That's assuming that it's a bit-rate issue. It could be another less obvious problem.

But yeah, try to find out which files have which bit-rates, and then test them to see if it is a bit-rate issue. If it is, then evktalo's advice should work.

[Liontamer]

That's assuming that it's a bit-rate issue. It could be another less obvious problem.

But yeah, try to find out which files have which bit-rates, and then test them to see if it is a bit-rate issue. If it is, then evktalo's advice should work.

I was about to say, the implication is it's something else, because all the individual OC ReMix postings work fine according to him, so that would mean it isn't necessarily a bitrate issue.

Anyone else having these kind of problems with MP3 CDs of OC ReMixes or OCR albums in their car stereo?

[The Damned]

Way to misread, me.

[Modus]

I have a 2003 Ford Escape with flat MP3 support. I'll burn a couple albums on a disc and report back with the results. I'll even try to get the same CD-Rs as you.

In the meantime, have you tried different CD-Rs? Using iTunes to burn instead?

[Bismarck]

Thanks for all of the suggestions. Here's what I found by looking at Nights: Lucid Dreaming, disc one:

1-01 Panzer Nightopia - 192kbps - doesn't work

1-02 Dreams Dreams - 192 kbps - doesn't work

1-03 From Dusk til Dawn - 192kbps - works

1-04 Lies Within Dreams - 192kbps - works

1-05 Reverse Rain - 192 kbps - doesn't work

...

It appears that all of them have a bit rate of 192kbps, which appears to be the same as the tracks in the main remix list. Next, looking at Heroes vs. Villains, I found that each of them had a different bit rate, usually above 192. Since none of these have worked, I figured that 192 might be the cutoff and that higher values wouldn't work. However, I then discovered that track 06, Zeus, track 09, Mega Man, and track 13, Link, all had bit rates lower than 192, specifically 185, 166, and 185 respectively.

I next checked to see if any songs higher than 192kbps successfully played, and I found that a number of the working songs in Pokemon: The Missingno. Tracks had a bit rate higher than 192kbps. Specifically, track 1-11, Drowning Blue, has a bit rate of 224 kbps, track 1-12, Spume, has a bit rate of 226 kbps, and track 1-15, Blue Haze, has a bit rate of 217 kbps, all of which play without a problem.

While it could still be a bit rate issue, these results certainly don't provide an obvious answer. I'll try a few different programs to burn the CDs tonight, and if that doesn't work, I'll try out some different CDs.

Thanks again for all your help!

[Level 99]

Okay, that is very weird.

All of the NiGHTS songs were encoded in the same format, from the same format, with identical specifications.

All have ID3v1 & ID3v2 tags, CBR192 at high quality using LAMEdrop, all encoded from WAVs that were 16-bit, 44.1khz. Absolutely no idea as to why some would work and some wouldn't.

[Liontamer]

Okay, that is very weird.

All of the NiGHTS songs were encoded in the same format, from the same format, with identical specifications.

All have ID3v1 & ID3v2 tags, CBR192 at high quality using LAMEdrop, all encoded from WAVs that were 16-bit, 44.1khz. Absolutely no idea as to why some would work and some wouldn't.

Our policy at OC ReMix is no ID3v1 tags on ANYTHING. They died in a fire.

[zircon]

Characters in song name? Length of name / text?

[Liontamer]

Characters in song name? Length of name / text?

Thanks for pointing those out. Something else to look at.

[Bismarck]

I tried several different CD burning programs yesterday, and none of them produced any different results. I don't believe it's a problem with characters or length, since one of the programs I used shortened the lengths of the track names before burning. Shortening the titles like this did not fix the problem.

My next plan is to compare the tracks from albums that have been posted in the main remix listing to their counterparts that were obtained from albums. For example, Bubble Junkie from Sound of Speed works from the main list, but does not work from the album. I believe there are a few other tracks that have both a list version and an album version, so I'll try what I can and get back to you all.

Thank you again for your help and support.