I think it would be helpful if you could update your response to this question with more information:ġ. I enjoyed the article and the comments, they were very informative as far as pointing me in the right direction for further investigation. Personally, what I want is a “Line In” port on my car stereo so I can hook up my portable media player (any portable media player, not just the iPod) and listen to my music without ever having to burn a CD at all. Unfortunately, unless that functionality is built in, it’s not something that can be added later. And like a computer, these can play both audio and data CDs.

The ability to play MP3 files from data CDs has already appeared in car and home stereo CD players. The good news is that CD players are catching up. It may take several audio CDs to hold what you might currently have on a single data CD. These contain only about 70 minutes or so. While you might have been able to put seven or eight hours of MP3s onto a single data CD before, you’re out of luck with an audio CD. The catch is that the audio CD is uncompressed. Other CD burning software will have similar options. The trick is simply to select Roxio’s “Music Disc Creator” program and click the Audio CD option as the type of CD you want to create. This automatically decompresses my MP3 files to the correct format for audio CDs. So what do you do? If you want to create an audio CD that will work in regular CD players, you’ll need to use audio CD burning software.

The problem is your car stereo probably doesn’t have a clue about compression or decompression. When you play an MP3 file, the software you use decompresses the sound as it’s played. A second of silence, for example, is going to require less data than a second of complex sounds.

It uses compression technology to make the file much smaller. MP3 is a compressed format, like almost every other common audio format available for internet downloads and computer use. Every second takes up 176,000 bytes, regardless of whether that’s a second of a symphony, someone speaking, or just silence. Remember that I said that an audio CD is uncompressed. It has a file system, directories, folders and files.īut your car stereo knows nothing about file systems, folders and the like. All it knows is how to stream that raw audio data off of an audio format CD. While your computer can do that it too, it’s also a general-purpose device that understands the format of a data CD.īut that’s not the only difference. The format of a data CD is even similar to the format of your computer’s hard disk. They’re just another media on which you can store files from your computer. If you’ve ever seen blank, 70-minute CDs, these hold roughly 740 megabytes of data – enough for about 70 minutes of sound in audio CD format.ĭata CDs, on the other hand, hold anything.

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