okay guys i just bought a alpine unit mp3 capable, im totally new to car audio, but yes i do plan on upgrading the speaker soon... anyways when recording to the disc do i just record them as a datefile in mp3 format? thanks

 

record it as a mp3 disk...u knw... audio disc, data disc, mp3 disk....

 

thank you sir.

 

if you're using windows xp when you pop a blank disk in it will ask you if you wanna open up a writable cd folder. You can use a burning program like Nero but this way works to. just click and drag folders of mp3s or the files themselves into this folder. then click make disk....if you have a burning ROM you can use it to make a data disk and just burn the mp3 files.

 

is it jst me or do mp3 disks have a "lower quality" audio than say regular audio cd's

 

mp3s by nature are compressed and your going to lose SOME quality, as opposed to a CD. my best advice is rip/download higher bitrate mp3s.

 

This is true. I rip my cd's onto my hard drive at 192Kbps. Sure, it is large, but I have a 160GB hard drive to work with and I am an audiophile. I can't stand the splashy songs that artist's put on their website. Here's a rule of thumb:

64Kbps: radio quality
128Kbps: near CD quality (most bands and record companies either post them as this or 112Kbps)
160Kbps: audible CD quality
320Kbps: CD quality (hardly compressed)

Anything between those numbers will just mean it's closer to the quality of the next number.

Think of it like this: a .WAV file sounds great, but is a HUGE file. An MP3 sounds great if it's a bigger file, but it's a compressed version of a .WAV file. Same goes with .MPG being a compressed .AVI for movies.

I personally use Windows Media because it's free and my Kenwood can play both. I hardly download music because I have over 320 some-odd CD's in my collection.