burning mp3's to CD
 

Is it possible to burn mp3's such that you get 100 or so songs on one disc? Just wondering how to do it and if the quality is decent?

If you want quality then you don't listen to mp3s.
How much you can put on a CD depends on
a) how much the CD can hold
b) how much space each individual mp3 takes up

yes it is possible, rather than spending a lot of money having the dealer install an ipod kit, i burn mp3 cds and they work perfectly, including the fact of changing songs from steering wheel
all u do is insert a nomral cd and on ur music program, make it to burn high format rather than audio cd ;)

That sounds easy--thanks for the tip! I'll give it a try.

You don't know what you're talking about.

If your COMAND supports DVDs, you can burn those too. You can get a ton of songs on a single DVD. I don't know which models have DVD COMANDS. My '06 C doesn't but my '06 S does.

Well he probably does. But can he tell the difference?

Note: CD Audio (PCM linear) can provide better audio quality than the highest bitrate mp3. Of course, for you to tell the difference you would have to compare with a high quality CD audio source. When converting such an audio source to mp3 you'll end up losing some quality. On the other hand, when converting most commercial pop music you won’t probably tell the difference because those audio sources just don't use the CD audio spectrum to the fullest.

As you can burn into CD, I've been doing since I got the car. I believe I got more than 100 songs in the CD

If you have an mp3 cd player, what you can do is burn album folders. What I found out, with my cousin's Sony head unit, is when I burn him mp3 data discs, the tracks come in out of order.

If you burn an entire folder (with a full album) the tracks will play on the disc in order. The most albums I put onto one cd (800mb) for him was 8 (~120 songs).

I used iTunes (bleh I know) but it works just fine.

iTunes 7.02.16 for PC burn-to-MP3 instructions:
Click "Edit"
Click "Preferences"
Click the "Advanced" tab
Click the "Burning" sub-tab
Click the "MP3 CD" radio button.

PLEASE NOTE: Your original songs must be in MP3 format for this to work. If they're in any other format, iTunes will not automatically convert them to MP3 during the burn process.

You'll need to create a play list and fill it with the songs you want. Then, just right-click on the play list and click "Burn play list to disk"

I burned about 75 MP3's as above to a CD-R disk and it works just fine in my 6-disk CD Changer. It does not play directly in my non-COMMAND, non-Harmon Kardon head unit.

You do need to be very patient when playing a disk with a lot of tracks! My CD-Changer needs a good couple minutes to scan through my whole 75 songs before it will start playing them.

Oh and the audio quality is decent. I personally can tell only very minor differences between the original CD and the same track burnt to MP3. The difference is still there, but I'm super happy to give up a little sound quality to have the convenience of my own huge-ass collection of songs in my CD Changer :)

brydon, I hope this works for my system/cd changer (since I have the audio package prior to Benz changing to Harmon Kardon).

But, I do want to point out that even though you are basically a newbie, you've taught me something new about iTunes and it's capability to burn mp3's as audio files (so that it can work as an audio cd, but have more songs). Honestly, I've never used iTunes, so this gave me a reason to download a free copy! This does a lot for me, so hopefully it works and definitely appreciate this info.

I'll give you all an update on whether this works with the systems/cd changers prior to 2005 updates.

Okay, so I tried this and the cd's won't play in my boss' regular cd changer, but I'll try them in my car changer tonight and if it works, then I'm set.

If not, it might be one of those upgrade things on the cd changers. I'm almost positive Steve had mentioned that there are certain MY's that have mp3 cd changers. I'm crossing my fingers that it works.

Sorry to report that this doesn't work for my cd changer in my car. When I loaded the cartridge, it goes directly to disc 2. When I push disc 1, it says, "no cd in disc 1".

I'm figuring it's based on newer models having the mp3 cd changer (I'm pretty sure that was the case). Oh well.

Damn! That sucks drex I'm sorry bro! Does anyone have an '05 W203 so we can check and see where the cutoff is? I guess if you want MP3 capability in your Benz you haveto go aftermarket and give up your instrument cluster support or go pay a visit to Mr. MBenzNL and get an 06 CD changer . . . he's the only one it sounds like we can trust to get you the 100% real deal on fiber optics, COMAND yadda yadda yadda

Do you have a CD slot in the COMAND unit (in the dash)? In the '06, that's MP3 compliant.

I'm pretty sure, even if I got the mp3 cd changer from steve, it wouldn't be compatible with my car. Oh well. No biggie, but I still appreciate the info on it. I'm sure the quality probably comes out better than data mp3 cd's.