I have an increasing number of MP3s, and I keep meaning to do tests to find out to what extent I can play them on the various shiny disc players that I have. I was wondering whether anyone has tried this and found out what usually works and what the issues and constraints are, such as:-

- must the MP3s be on the root of the CDROM
- how many directories deep can they be for the player to find them, etc.
- are there bitrate issues
- are there players that can read and display the tags

I realise this is certainly different between makes and models, and not all CD players will even play MP3s, but some claim to.

I tried to a test. I put some MP3s onto a CDR, some at the root level, some in a directory, and some in a subdirectory of the directory. The shiny disc players I have plugged in are a Philips DVD 963SA, and a Shanling CD-T80. Trying the Philips first, I saw that the instructions say, in the 'Specification' in the 'Audio Format' section: MP3 (ISO 9660): 96, 112, 128, 256kbps, variable bit rate 32, 44.1, 48kHz.

Most of the MP3s I was using were at 224kbps, a few, in directories, were at 182kbps. I have noticed that these bit rates don't coincide with values enumerated in the Philip's specification, although they are between the maximum and minimum. All were at 44.1 kHz.

I put the CD into the Philips. The display of the player suddenly said MP3. Then the player seemed to restart itself, its display went blank (all underscores or hyphens), and then it said again MP3. It seemed to be looping. It wouldn't play the disc. I feared at one stage that I wouldn't be able to get it to eject the disc. Failure with the Philips.

Shanling.I didn't bother to look at the instructions or specification as the 'manual' is four sides of Chinese. I put the disc into the Shanling, but the display didn't update itself to anything helpful. I pressed Play, and heard a loud rushing (sort of white noise) sound from the speakers. Failure.

I put the CD into the player of my car (Toyota), and there was just silence. The CD wouldn't play. The CD player display was blank (on another occasion I have previously seen it display 'Error' when I had put a badly recorded CD ROM in it).

I also have a Marantz CD player which is in storage, but I might try that at some stage.

Three failures out of three tests is a bit discouraging. Has anyone been more successful with this, or can anyone suggest what I can do to get it to work in at least the Philips, whose specification suggests it should work. Maybe I need to encode some test MP3s at one of the bitrates in its specification.

The issue might be the files' tagging. I remember my ID3-compatible mobile phone being unable to display any tags while I was still using ID3v1 + ID3v2.4 on my MP3s. It couldn't read the ID3v2.4 tags and then also failed reading the ID3v1 ones. I corrected this issue by getting rid of ID3v2 and switching to ID3v1 + APE. The mobile didn't even try reading the APE tags and finally read the ID3v1 ones then.

A similar problem seems to be plaguing the Philipps player. It might fail reading the files' tags, but continously attempts to successfully display them, causing the looping you described. Check the tagging of your MP3 collection, if ID3v2.4 or ID3v2.3 UTF-16 is present convert it to the more compatible ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 (MP3tag can do this) format. Or get rid of ID3v2 entirely and switch to APE instead, the Phillips won't bother trying to read APE at all, just like the mobile phone.

The other players you wrote about could be victims of the same issue, although I wonder why all 4 players refuse playing the MP3s back. At least one of them could do so and simply display the filenames instead of the unreadable tags.



As you figured yourself, that's different from player to player. Common ones are able to read directories and also subdirectories, making it unnecessary to store all files in /root. But my own car stereo, for example, just displays the directories where it finds some data, i.e. if I use the common /root/artist/album/sample.mp3 system, it simply ignores the /artist directory and just shows the /album one.



So far I haven't heard about any players having bitrate issues with MP3s. There just seem to be rare problems with decoders of more modern formats, I remember a thread in the Vorbis subforum where some HA members complained about decoders which weren't able to decode either <96 kbps or <64 kbps.



In the case of ID3 most players display the tags, although it's commonly just ID3v1. The displaying of ID3v2, APE, Vorbis Comment and MP4 tags is rather rare.

Thank you for a helpful discussion and some good suggestions, Junon. I'll look into the tag issue.

The tag thing may be the problem with the DVD player. Many (not all) of those play mp3. No audio CD player does, however. Of course many newer players are multi-format, but those are not specifically red book audio CD players. Any CD player more than a few years old, and the great majority of those newer ones being sold as HiFi CD players, do not understand mp3. Also, I believe the number of automobile CD-only players is much greater than the number of automobile multi-format players.

I just got a home entertainment system this weekend and made a couple of MP3 discs to play with. The first one has 116 single tracks, all in the root directory, a mix of CBR and VBR. The on-screen display shows them by the track name and ignores the ID tags but everything played perfectly. The only thing I noticed was that one track showed up out of order. All the other tracks were formatted with Capital Letters In Each Word, but one (kd lang) was in lower case and it showed up at the bottom of the list after ZZ Top.

The other disc has 11 full albums. Band name as directory in the root, followed by a subdirectory of the album, containing the tracks. The machine can navigate from the root down to the subdirectory no problem and plays each full album sequentially with no need for me to do anything.

I had no problems of any kind, although my manual offers precious few details on just about anything. My only snag is that the machine reads from the track name (must be Joliet) but the on-screen display doesn't have enough room to display it all, so the screen reads "Green Day - 01 -Wa" on the disc with everything in the root.

It may be that your player doesn't do any sorting of the files but simply plays them in the order in which they appear on the CD. If you dragged and dropped the files to your CD burning program, Windows is notorius for having one file copied out of order.