fitting CD changer

I have Mini One with radio boost that is prewired to the hatch in the boot for a CD changer. Am I stuck with buying the mini CD changer from BMW at about £270 incl brackets or will any other 'off the shelf' changer fit the prewired socket.

regards Smudge (Bournemouth UK)

Reply to
Smudge
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[an excellent reference article about fitting an MP3 CD changer to a Mini]

Thanks - I've saved a copy of this posting for future use.

Just got a call from the dealer - our Mini is on the lot; we can pick it up tomorrow afternoon. Yippee!!

Reply to
John Francis

We looked at a multi changer for our Mini.

My advice is to forget it and buy an MP3 head unit. It saves boot space and you can fit 12 albums per CD (At 128kbps which gives good quality playback even at high levels). All we need to do is carry 3 CDRs and that gives us

36 albums worth of music. It has never jumped even with the Cooper suspension and has more power output than the boost unit.

The unit we have, Sony CDX-MP40, only cost £160 and BMW fitted it for £20.

Warren

Reply to
Warren

Thats very interesting....what do you use to copy CD to MP3??

Smudge

Reply to
Smudge

I'm by no means an advanced user, but I recently bought a panasonic mp3 cd/radio player (£100) and based on my experience:

Just save as data files on the cd. Generally try and keep them one directory deep - say an album per directory, or the disk takes longer to read.

Mine can - it has up/down/left/right navigation buttons

as above

The 'id tag' of the file can be displayed - the tag contains name, track no., length and so on. It can be a bit cumbersome navigating though - no worse than a changer I would have thought. Once read (15-20s) the player navigates quite quickly.

er, not sure for that model, or mine for that matter. Sequentially from where you last left it I think. it plays at least one album at a time - too busy track hopping to notice! Can you download the manual?

Frankly I think an mp3 cd player is a no-brainer until cheap solid state comes along, although I'm not a real ICE buff - just like a bit of music on the move. Incidentally, you might like to try easy cd-da extractor - easy to use and rips cds v. quickly, about 5 mins. hth Rob

Reply to
RJH

Thanks, it is all becoming clearer now.

Reply to
Smudge

I use my PC which has a cd burner, they cost about £25 now if you shop around. Then I have ripper software where I put in a CD, it reads it then gets the track lists from the CDDB and then rips it with hyst the press of a button :)

I then save one album per directory names at the album name using normal burning software and save as a data disk.

Yep is can, I think it can go 8 levels deep aolthough I find one album per directory one level deep the best

As it treats each directory as an album you can just step through an album at a time or a track at a time. As you can label the tracks you also get the track names displayed etc.

You change directories and then it treats all tracks in a directory as an album.

I will play through the whole CD one track at a time and will handle all the directory changes etc for you.

An MP3 DVD player would be great. One disk would be all you would ever need :)

Reply to
667

The panasonic that RJH has sounds the same as the Sony in how it works.

Warren

Reply to
Warren

No it wouldn't. An MP3 DVD holds approximately 100CDs. I've got between two and three times that much on my Archos Jukebox (which has a 20GB hard drive), and I know several people with far more CDs than I own.

I'm probably going to make an MP3 DVD, though; we've just bought the unabridged Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit); I'll be creating MP3 CDs for when we put an MP3 changer in the new car, but I'll make a backup DVD at the same time.

The new car (which we picked up less than 24 hours ago):

formatting link

Reply to
John Francis

Right, I've bought a new player/radio for the car.. JVC KD-SC900R, Should play CD CDR/W MP3 etc

I have copied CD to MP3 using CDex which was rec by someone here. Great, got

10 CD converted to MP3 all on to one CD, it plays perfectly on PC but in the car no sound. The screen on the receiver in the car shows all the titles and directory structure and a countdown shows that the tracks are playing, but no sound through speakers!. Normal CD's work ok

In the troubleshooting guide for the player it states that the ripped CD session should be finalised.....I have done this. And that the MP3's should be recorded to format compliant with ISO 9660 Level 1, 2 or Joliet.

Could this be my problem, if so what downloadable program is best to convert CD to MP3.

As said earlier I have converted CD to MP3 with "CDex " and ripped to CDR with EasyCD creator.

regards Smudge

Reply to
Smudge

Just a guess, but are they encoded to constant, as opposed to variable, bit rate? VBR can cause problems. Rob

Reply to
RJH

Strange...just re converted all the Cd's to mp3 again, ripped a new cd for the car and this time it worked. And I have no idea why

Smudge

Reply to
Smudge

Smudge,

I have an AIWA CDC MP3 player....(in my old bimmer, not in the Mini yet).

I think it the burning program, more than the actually ripping of CD's into MP3's. I used to have such problems....when I used adaptec's CD Writer. I switched to Roxio 5.0 for writing the MP3 to CD's and it worked like a charm. Joilet recording format works best for MP3 players in my opinion, and yes you do make sure you finalize the CD's.

Good luck

-Ram

Reply to
Ram

Thanks, I am using Joliet with Easy CD Creator it works fine now. Re finalising, I have found that I only need to finalise the session not the disk, so I can still add tracks if desired.

Smudge

Reply to
Smudge

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