Gator5000e

Has anyone gotten any CD/DVD-A discs that show disc and track title? I have not and it's a pain to remember what disc is in the changer.

Also, wonder why the FM Radio does not show station information, like call letters and music type? Lots of stations around Orlando broadcast that info and my previous car, an Audi A6, displayed this info. Seems like a major ommission to something that is pretty basis and standard today. Especially with all the room on the Navi Screen.

Oh well. My bit*h session for the day.

dseag2

I know what you mean about remembering what disc is in the changer, but no... I haven't found any discs that display the info you mentioned.

Re: showing FM station info, that requires "RDS". Some cars have it and some don't. Not sure of the rhyme or reason. Also, not every FM station broadcasts that info. I don't think my FX has it either, but with XM in both cars they can take out the AM/FM button as far as I'm concerned!

mungoac

I don't think you'll get the disk/track/artist info on a normal CD. When you rip CD's to an MP3 disk, however, most encoding software lets you tie in to an online database that will "bake" this info into the ripped tracks, which can the be read by the MP3 function in the RL's sound system.
Just before taking my RL on its maiden voyage a couple of weeks ago, I loaded the sweeter parts of my music library -- the part I fondly refer to as my road music -- on a couple of dozen MP3 disks and hit the road. The car was not without some of the electronic bugs which have been the subject of some exceptionally fine rants on many of these bulletin boards, but oooh -- the sweetness of the sound.
I find that the RL's Bose system is superior to the Mark Levinson system I left behind in a fine but boring Lexus with 11,500 miles on it. And as I sat in traffic jams the Nav system was not in the mood to display, I could at least enjoy my music, while the partly useless Nav screen now assisted my rapidly declining memory synapses with the name of the disk, the artist and the track.
I believe that had I been able to visit the car designers' Parnassus and asked its denizens, "Oh fer chrissakes get old Uncle Mungo a perfect car already," this is pretty much what they would have come up with -- after my dealership's somewhat addled service department works out the bugs.
Rip a couple of MP3's and enjoy the whole package as much as I do.
Happy New Year, by the way...

427

And there I was ... Thinking I was the only one who couldn't figure this out. Whether or not I see the text info ... I thoroughly enjoy the sound. BTW- My home stereo has a volume control that goes to 10 ... I once heard a system that went to 11. The Bose system in the RL goes all the way up to 40 ... Amazing! But I bet it won't be long until some company decides to go to 41.

8-)

[QUOTE=mungoac] Just before taking my RL on its maiden voyage a couple of weeks ago, I loaded the sweeter parts of my music library -- the part I fondly refer to as my road music -- on a couple of dozen MP3 disks and hit the road. /QUOTE]
A couple dozen MP3s? Isn't that enough to go cross-country and back without repeating anything? Must have been one heck of a maiden voyage!!!

8-)

A couple dozen MP3s? Isn't that enough to go cross-country and back without repeating anything? That's a lot of music!

marks

I have noticed the same thing. The bothersome thing for me is that in the owner's manual it shows the disc titles. So, why can't ours?

Mark

mungoac

You're absolutely right, but look at it this way: Come February and dreams of Key West and such civilized places, I'm all set with the rock and roll. All I need is pack the dopkit and the Ovaltine and hit the road...

8-)

Uh, I barely remember Ovaltine, but dopkit? I had to google that one.

You can never have too much good music. Load up a handful of MP3s and you're set for a while, that's neat.

legendguy

I haven't tried the MP3 yet with the titles (actually I HAVE tried, just not successfully, I have yet to try Nero 6.0). However, many CDs have the text information already on them. Trouble is, that you won't know it unless you give them a try. I must have put 20 CDs in the RL changer before I got a hit: John Mayer, Heavier Things. Apparently this CD text arrangement is a Sony technology found on mostly Columbia Records (I am kinda sketchy on this so don't quote me). Anyway, the text CDs are out there, but I want to be able to burn some MP3s with the text on them. This would be awesome to have a hundred or so songs with text coming up on the navi screen!

Agree that Acura should have included the FM song title feature. Do like the XM though.

Joe

Kickbucket1

I've noticed that some CDs show the title on the screen along with the song title on the audio screen and track listing page. Harry Connick Jr's "Only You" shows everything while Evanescence's "Fallen" shows nothing. DTS, DVD-A and my ripped MP3's show nothing also. I guess it will be hit or miss with the CDs.

8-)

I use Itunes to burn MP3s and the song titles are listed. But there is some weirdness: The track listing generated by the stereo lists the track number before every tune. MP3 tracks are sorted in alphabetical order, and play in alphabetical order. So to have your playlist play in the order you want, you need to start each track with "01" "02" "03" and so on in the order you want them to play. Therefore, in the stereo's track listing you get "01 01 A Song Name" for your first song. So each song has the track number listed twice when you scroll through the song listing on the Nav. It bothered me at first, and I tried for hours to get around this, but with no luck. If anyone knows a solution, please advise. Oh, the track name that the stereo shows is the actual file name, not something contained within the MP3 file.

Oh, one more thing: As far as the album name that shows in the nav window, for the MP3 disks I've burned, it takes the album name from the first song, and then keeps it for all the tracks on the MP3 disk. Hopefully there's a better way that I just don't know about.

And another thing, while I'm at it! The stereo replaces some characters in the file/song name with underscores. Parenthesis and quotes, I believe. So I try to avoid these characters in song/file names.

I know very little about MP3s and the RL's stereo, so these comments are just from my short experience, and there are people here that surely can help. Mungoac has burned a bunch of MP3s, so maybe he has some info.

mungoac

The alphabetic thing used to drive me nuts too, particularly with expensive SW like Roxio's in my opinion hopeless kluge of a package. But then I found a freeware ripper called CDex ( http://cdexos.sourceforce.net ). The most recent version is 1.51. When it accesses the online database -- I believe it is the CDDB function in the taskbar -- it incorporates the track number first in front of the song title, so that you actually get the tracks in the original order without further hassles. The only problem is that once in a while the CDDB is down, in which case I wait for another day.
Another advantage with CDex is that it retains your settings. For example, I rip at 192 kbps, as opposed to the 92-128 kbps used by most people, but not as high as the 320 kbps broadcast spec. On some commercial packages you have to set this manually for each CD you rip and it gets to be a pain in the ass, because sometimes you forget and that wastes storage space on the end product.
CDex also adds the album title in its hierarchy. The only other problem I have with this is not in the software but in the database. It occasionally uses a mixed-up protocol in classical music. My favorite instrument is the cello and it will some times say that the artist is Dvorak, some times Yo-Yo Ma. But since you're not talking about a slew of tracks on such albums, this is simple to correct manually. There may be some other trifles that may cause irritation with the most anal of us car freaks, but this elegant little package has given me a relatively relaxed relationship with the whole MP3 world. Try it.

eaRL

CDex is a great ripper. You have as much or as little control over the quality of the MP3 tracks as you like and you can use various compatible MP3 encoders (i.e. LAME, Xing, Fraunhoffer, Monkey's Audio, etc.). I personally prefer to use LAME/Stereo/MPEG-I VBR@96-256 kbps with VBR Quality set to VBR 2 or VBR 3 to get the highest quality and a smaller file size.

If you are ripping a book-on-CD or something like that use LAME/Stereo/MPEG-II CBR@96kbps with a quality of 5. MPEG-II uses a lower sample rate and a spoken word track doesn't have nearly the complexity or dynamics of a music CD. Your file sizes will be tiny compared to ripping the same track at a higher bitrate.

BTW, there are more than the few publicly accessible CDDB sites out there. I think that freedb.freedb.org (ports 888 or 8880 for CDDB protocol or port 80 for HTTP protocol access) will send you to a random CD database each time. Just try accessing the database a few times if it times out the first time. Use /~cddb/cddb.cgi for the path if you are forcing the application to use a particular server.

To access a particular DB use one listed below:

at.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #Vienna, Austria
ca.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #Winnipeg, MB Canada
ca2.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #Montreal, QC Canada
de.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #Berlin, Germany
es.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #Madrid, Spain
fi.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #Tampere, Finland
fr.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #Paris, France
no.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #Tromso, Norway
ru.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #Saint-Petersburg, Russia
uk.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #London, UK
us.freedb.org 80 /~cddb/cddb.cgi #San Jose, CA USA

The correct URL for CDex is: http://cdexos.sourceforge.net

8-)

CDEX looks good, I'll give it a try.

I'll still end up with "01 01 Song name" on the nav screen, right?

Does CDEX cause both the song name and artist/album name to show up on the nav screen?

Thanks.

Gator5000e

Real Player, with version 10.5 installed, works very well. It records all text info that comes up on the Navi screen. And the album title will show in the listing of discs in the changer while in CD mode.

Just a real pain to rip CDs you already own just to get this info displayed.

BTW, has anyone figured out how to copy a DVD-A disc to show text without losing any sound quality? What program? Record to a DVD-R?

Thanks for any thoughts.

eaRL

Yes. The track number would appear twice.

You can use the artist, album title, track number and more in any order you choose with CDex. For example, under Options --> Settings --> Filenames, if you put %7-%A-%4 as your Filename Format you would get an MP3 file with a name like: 01-Led Zeppelin-Black Dog.mp3

eaRL

The only software out there, that I know of anyway, that will author DVD Audio discs is Discwelder STEEL by Minnetonka software. You will have to part with ~$500 for the software. To be able to author a DVD-A from multi-channel sources, including SACD, and to be able to upmix from 2-channel Stereo to 5.1 you would need Discwelder CHROME II which will set you back $3000+.

427

At someones previous suggestion, I searched the TL forum for old threads regarding DVD-A and found this interesting one regarding WaveLab 5 (<--- Click)