cclive

I have 07 with Nav, and finally figured out the limit on the length of file names...29 characters total (thanks FTMorganAL), but still have a funny thing happening. I made up a disc with 19 folders with 5 songs in each. The folders are simply named...01 through 19. When I display the folders, they show up as 01 through 19, but when I play the songs in them, the folders show up as 02 through 20. Weird... Since I shortened the names of the individual files that were long, all the songs show up and play, which is a big improvement. Any ideas???

Also as an aside, CD-RW's seem to work just fine. When I want to listen to podcasts, I just put them on an RW rather than mess with connecting my MP3 player. It really doesn't take much longer, and then I can just erase and use the disc over again.

Also, when I shortened the file names that were too long, I found that when the folder contents are displayed, it shows the actual file name. But when it plays the song, it displays the ID3 tag, so you get the entire name, even if its longer.

FortMorganAl

The root directory is #1. Also, any individual tracks in the root directory are played before it starts through the folders.

cclive

That's very interesting....and it makes sense. so maybe I'll put 5 songs in the root also! Thanks for the good info....its why I love this forum. What problem did you find that the VBR causes?/? All of my mp3's are recorded at 256 bit VBR on the hard drive, so it would be a huge pain to change them...

FortMorganAl

The issue with VBR is that the unit can't correctly calculate where it is in the recording. It appears to use the time position in the recording to decide how to fast forward and reverse and when to quit. With VBR it doesn't calculate the time correctly and so gets very confused when going forward or reverse. It will also almost always end early. Sometimes it is is only a few seconds early in the silence at the end of the track so you would never notice. Other times it will end minutes early as if you pressed the skip to next track. The longer the track the worse the symptoms get. With the 1 hour long tracks I was testing with it is a VERY obvious issue.

There is a simple (note how lightly the word simple comes off my fingertips ) solution to fix your 256 VBR problem. Get the free program LAME http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php. It is not the most user friendly interface (you need to be comfortable with DOS command line entries) but it will do batch conversions of formats. You really need it anyway if you are serious about making MP3 files. Once it is set up you can create a batch file that makes a new copy of all the tracks in any other bitrate. You start the conversion and come back a few hours later to find all the work done. Let me know if you need help with this and I'll send you some sample batch files to use as examples.