2006 MP3 and WMA player

hmm. the manual does talk about what kind of filestructure is okay for mp3 discs. i remember that it does say that folders > 2 deep are not good, but i dont remember a limit on the # of folders.

its a little bit lame, since it flattens out all the folders -- all you see are the "leaf" folders in the display.

 

I just picked up my new 06 Prius today. The CD player will read CDRs with MP3s burned on it? That would help me out tremendously as I'm waiting to get XM installed.

 

Thanks for your help!

 

ah - you have chinese characters in your filenames? unicode?

the manual says that the player supports the Joliet extensions (actually it says Romeo and Joliet, which i think is a translation error, since to my knowledge there's no cdrom extension called Romeo, and of course there's the famous play Romeo and Juliet. there is an extention called Rock Ridge, maybe that's what they were trying to refer to). according to google, joliet should support unicode.

maybe you need to turn on joliet in your burning program, since this link implies that joliet fixes some problem with unicode characters in ISO9660.

joliet spec

 

I read in the manual the number of files that can be played is limited to 255. I made a mp3 CD with 11 albums, appx. 120 songs, VBR, and they all played OK.

 

i dont know if there's such a thing as juliet or not, but joliet is an extension of the ISO9660 CDROM filesystem specificiation.

ID3 tags are what contain the title, artist, genre, etc. in mp3 files.

max 255 files!? man. 8-bit variables, how retro. well, i guess this means that we can encode at higher bitrates then!

 

I have not had a problem at all.
I encode mine at higher bit rates and could not fit 800 songs on a disk. Maybe there is a file number limit.

I organize my MP3's with the artist folder at the root and the album name under that. I've got one that has 8 album folders all play with no problem.

The only issue I have is that I could not get it to display the tag information. It just shows folder name and file name. It does not scroll the file name it only displays like 20 charicters or so. So I'm just going to have or name and organize my files differently. But that is my issue and not with the player.

If you create an ISO of the disk and post it somewhere for me I'll try and see where the problem is.

 

Yes, iTunes has to be set to rip into mp3 format.

I've tried two things so far:
1) Burn a playlist to disc in iTunes (set burning pref to mp3 first)
This works, and song titles are displayed on the Prius console. But all songs are under the root, not in individual album folders.
2) Use Toast to burn a data CD. I used "Mac OS extended and PC format" and I turned the "CD Text" button on. I titled the CD with the artist name, and dragged individual album folders from my iTunes music folder to the toast window. This works better; the car displays albums as folders and songs as files inside them.

Does anyone know--can we have another level of folders within this (for multiple artists on a single mp3 disc, for example)?

Note that the text is only displayed when the "audio" button on the console is pushed. The audio buttons on the steering wheel only display folder and file number at the top of whatever other screen is displayed (info, nav, etc.)

Kirk
San Jose

 

I tried burning a CD-R of mp3 files today for the first time. They play back okay, but the songs don't stay in the proper order. iTunes knows the track numbers (because I assume they are embedded in the ID3 tags), but apparently the Prius doesn't. I suppose I can just rename the files to begin with the track number. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

 

i think the prius plays the songs back in the order they were burned to the disc, which may not necessarily be what you think it is, depending on the burning program.

itunes does have the option to name the files with track number, so i guess you can try that and see what happens.

 

i didnt have to turn on CD-TEXT to get tracknames. i think CD-TEXT only works for real audio CDs, not mp3 cds. my mp3s have id3 information, and i assume that's where the prius stereo got the track info from.

agree that you have to press the audio button, otherwise you just get folder # and track #.

i burned a disc with artist/album/songs.mp3 and the prius just showed me all the album folders. it seems to have brought all the "leaf" folders to the top of its tree. thats bogus.

i also did the iTunes mp3 disc experiment and i got the same behavior; all files were at the root of the disc. iTunes also has a setting to burn a "data" disc... maybe it makes folders in that mode?

 

Last night I burned a CD w/ list of folders and mp3's I want. Prius seems to randomly pick whatever the order it wants to play instead of following the alphanumeric order. On my mp3 cd, I have:
01 song title #1
02 song title #2
03 song title #3

But prius plays #3 first and then #1 and 2. I don't think I enabled random feature on the player because when I play regular CD, it plays in the right order.

Is there any way to sort the order on prius? I used Nero to burn the mp3 disk.

thanx.

ps: I think "folder list" button is disabled when the car is in motion, right?

 

is there a way to look at the CDROM filesystem before nero burns the disc? as i mentioned before the burning program may not be burning the tracks to the disc in numeric order. i used iTunes to make a disc and i'm pretty certain that the playlist order is the way it got written to the disc.

yes! its really dumb that folder list is disabled when the car is moving. really, how much more distracting is the folder list than the energy display!?

 

i did a bit more research and found the following. iTunes can be made to do the right thing either for flat or hierarchical discs. my flat discs play in the order that the tracks are shown in iTunes.

1) if you make a playlist in iTunes and sort it by "play order" (meaning have the very first column with the blue checkboxes highlighted) then it will burn a flat mp3 disc. i'm not sure if it matters if "mp3 disc" or "data disc" is selected in the prefs, but i have mp3 disc selected. the prius will play this in the order displayed in iTunes.

2) if you sort that playlist by any other order (for instance by clicking in the artist column) it will burn a hierarchical disc. the prius hates this - random play seems to stay within a folder, and its a big pain in the butt when you are making a compilation disc with many, many artists and albums.

3) if you want to have a flat disc sorted in some particular order (like album, or artist) you click on the column you want, and then right click (or control-click) on the playlist name in the column of playlists on the left, and choose "copy to play order". then click on the top of the first column in the playlist (as in #1) and then burn the disc.

 

pfile,

Thanx for the info. I don't have iTunes software so I have to test few more settings using Nero w/ CD-RW instead of CD-R's.

take care

 

well you know its a free download from apple, right? i dont think it installs any spyware or anything, it should be relatively safe.

edit: by the way, iTunes makes the filenames like so:

001 Name of song 1.mp3
002 Name of song 2.mp3
003 Name of song 3.mp3

etc.

so maybe you can try nero with 3-digit numbers before the song name?