A question about burning CDs

[OnionPatch]

I'm no computer expert so I'm having a hard time figuring this problem out:

I have a cross-country road trip coming up and would like to burn a bunch of CDs from audio books downloaded from the internet to take with me and play in my car's CD player.

These files are .wma files or .mp3 files. The average audio book has about 150MB but play for about 5-10 hours. The blank CDs I have say they will hold 700MB, which seems like plenty, or 80 minutes, which is not nearly enough. Why the difference?

How would you go about recording these books on CDs to take with me or is it impossible?

[jayfish]

1. Compression.

See, .wma files and .mp3 files are media in a compressed format. When you play those files through Windows Media Player or Winamp or whatever player you choose, the player decompresses the files and turns them into audio. Now having said that, there are two different ways to write a media file to a cd as a compressed data file (.mp3, .wmv, .mpeg), which will consume x bytes of data or an uncompressed stream that will take x minutes of playback time. For an experiment, rip a track from an audio cd to your PC as an mp3 file. Then, rip the same track as a wave file. You will see a huge difference in the size of the files. You can write more data to a cd as mp3 or wma files but you will need a player that has the ability to decompress and play them. Hope that helps.

Jay

[OnionPatch]

4. Oh, I get it.

That makes sense. I guess I need to look for a player, then.

[jayfish]

5. This Is A Decent Unit.

Pioneer 3700MP

Jay

[bvar22]

2. Does the CD Player in your car support MP3 playback?

Most don't.
You should check before you burn a bunch of disks.

[OnionPatch]

3. I doubt it

So, what do I need? Some other kind of player? An mp3 player? I'm not even sure what they are or how much they cost or even how they work. Yeesh, I'm gettin' old. I used to relish new technology.....now it just confuses me.

[dad]

6. You need to get some software that converts MP3s to regular CD audio files

http://www.afterdawn.com/software/cdr_software/cdr_applications/nero.cfm

You should get some software that converts MP3s to regular CD audio files as it burns, such as Nero.