Odd iTunes Question

[Amy]

I made a playlist on iTunes of my favorite Christmas songs. I want to burn them to a CD to play in my car. The playlist is 415.6mb, and the CD-R that I want to burn it to has a capacity of 700mb. Yet iTunes tells me that these won't fit on one CD and I'll need several CDs to burn this playlist. Why? A megabyte is a megatye, right? Why can't 415mb fit on the CD?

 

[nmmom95]

Did you check that you are only burning the Christmas playlist? I had a problem copying songs onto my nano, because it tried to copy everything on iTunes and said I didn't have enough available memory.

 

[Amy]

Did you check that you are only burning the Christmas playlist? I had a problem copying songs onto my nano, because it tried to copy everything on iTunes and said I didn't have enough available memory.

Yep, I selected that playlist, went to File/Burn Playlist to Disk. I even tried deleting songs from the playlist to see if I could get it only 1 disk. I got it down to 95mb and it STILL said it wouldn't fit onto 1 disk.

I told it to burn the disk anyway, and it put 20 songs onto the first disk. I didn't bother doing any more disks, I just wanted to see how many it thought could fit.

Weird, huh?

 

[dawson5]

Last I knew, cd's were set to time limit for audio files. The mb comes into play for data files. Did you burn them as .wav files?

This will sound odd but will your car cd player recognize dvd's? You might be able to put them all onto a dvd and listen that way.

 

[Amy]

Hmm, I'll have to look into burning them to a DVD. I have no idea if my car will play DVD's.

Maybe you're right about the time limit rather than a mb limit. I hadn't thought of that.

Oh well - I'll just use several CD's if I have to. I just wanted to be able to drive to pick my son up at college without having to switch CD's en route. i'm not good at driving with distractions like that.

 

[disneychrista]

Last I knew, cd's were set to time limit for audio files. .

You can usually only put about 80 mins of audio on a CD.

 

[Ephany]

If your car has tape deck, there are cheap adapters that will you allow you to play your iPod through your car's speakers. I used mine all the time in my last vehicle.

 

[bonoriffic]

Does your car play MP3s? If not, if you try to burn a playlist it will convert it to CD audio format. 415.6 MB of MP3 could be anywhere from 3 to 10 hours of audio. Of course it won't fit on a single CD.

 

[dawson5]

If your car has tape deck, there are cheap adapters that will you allow you to play your iPod through your car's speakers. I used mine all the time in my last vehicle.

There are also fm transmitters. They are sketchy last I knew though, we bought one for the oldest. This was years ago.

Like bonoriffic said, if it will recognize mp3's, that might be your best bet. I think those are recognized as data and the time wouldn't come into play. I think the thing that is throwing it all for a loop is the itunes, what format are the files in. I know you can take .wav and convert to mp3, but doesn't itunes have a proprietary format? I don't know if there is a way to convert that to mp3. I don't have itunes, kids are asleep (snow day, late start) so I can't ask them right now. I know there is a free program that will convert mp3's to wav, not sure if it will do .wav to mp3.

 

[Carl]

First, your car's cd player must be able to play mp3 cds.
Second, in itunes you must choose to make an mp3 cd, instead of an audio cd.
If both of these are true, you can get much more on the cd than on an audio cd.

 

[golfgal]

You can only get about 20-22 songs on a CD-R.

 

[BunsenH]

First, your car's cd player must be able to play mp3 cds.
Second, in itunes you must choose to make an mp3 cd, instead of an audio cd.
If both of these are true, you can get much more on the cd than on an audio cd.

I agree. The file formats are probably what's causing your dilemma.

My iTunes holds mp3 files. If I want to burn a CD to play in a home stereo (audio CD), I can fit 15-18 songs. If I want a CD to play in the car (mp3), I can fit up to 150 songs.

 

[136368]

It's all about formats. The tracks in your iTunes folder are all stored typically as AAC or MP3 formats. Both are compressed files and therefore take up less space than the standard CD format at the cost of sound quality. CDs - as opposed to MP3 CDs, which only certain cars can play - use a format that maximises sound quality but which takes up far more room, megabyte wise. Therefore, when an AAC or MP3 file is transformed into a standard CD format, the files will take up more room, limiting the amount of playback time you can expect.

 

[Amy]

Thanks for all your replies! I knew I'd find the answer here on the DIS! At least I wasn't doing anything wrong - it's just the file format.