Audio Argument

You can burn MP3 or WMA files (burn as data files) onto a CD and play it as you would a normal CD. This should give you up to 150 songs on one disc, depending on file size.

You can, of course, still play your iPod or other player through the AUX jack. I hope you enjoy your 08 as much as I enjoy mine.

 

X2 A mp3 ripped at 128k (cd quality) is about 1mb per minute of music. If you have a 700mb disk you have about 700 mins... if you average 3 mins per song, that's 233 songs. Anyway, your can plug your ipod (or other mp3 player or audio device) in the aux port or load up the CD player with mp3's/WMAs just as Joekc said.

Mike

 

I rip at 192 which accounts for the lower number of possible songs on a CD. Some people can't tell the difference (I usually can't) but younger people almost always can. Also, Oregonmike, please note you can't mix WMA and MP3 files on the same disk, but you probably wouldn't do that anyway.

 

Anything lower than 320 starts to suffer from compression effects and a loss of low end frequency response occurs. This is especially noticable with the 128 bit recordings. A real CD is rated at 1411 yet on most poor quality systems one cannot usually detect the difference between 1411 and 320. With a quality recording one may hear the difference between 1411 and 128. Start upgrading the stereo system and the difference becomes VERY noticable.

Here is some basic information about bit rates and compression.

Bit-rate indicates the amount of audio data being transferred at a given time. The bit-rate can be recorded in two ways - variable or constant. A variable bit-rate creates smaller files by removing inaudible sound. It is therefore suited to Internet distribution in which bandwidth is a consideration. A constant bit-rate, in comparison, records audio data at a set rate irrespective of the content. This produces a replica of an analogue recording, even reproducing potentially unnecessary sounds. As a result, file size is significantly larger than those encoded with variable bit-rates.

Table 2 indicates how a constant bit-rate affects the quality and file size of an audio file.

Table 2 Indication of audio quality expected with different bit-rates
Bit rate - Quality - MB/min
1411- CD quality -10.584
192 - Good CD quality - 1.440
128 - Near CD quality - 0.960
112 - Near CD quality - 0.840
64 - FM quality - 0.480
32 AM quality 0.240
16 Short-wave quality 0.120​

 

Yeah, did your friend take a giant bong hit right before he said that?

Okay, maybe he didn't understand that the aux input is an analog stereo input. Maybe he thought it was a digital input, and therefore it made sense to list supported formats/codecs. But as an analog stereo input, any format/codec is supported as long as you connect a suitable player to the aux input. So "MP3/WMA" can't apply to the aux input, it must mean those are supported on CDs.

 

320KBPS is the highest bitrate available in mp3 (for 44.1KHz). At that bitrate, the compression is lossless and is as good as CD. Bitrates below that employ compression techniques that rely on removing components that you can't here, similar to ATRAC compression pioneered by Sony prior to MP3.

I rip everything at 320K VBR. It really cuts down the average to about 128K but goes up to 320K when it's really needed for detail.

 

The way you put this makes it a little misleading. You said: "rely on removing components that you can't here <sic>". If you can't hear them, they are by definition unnecessary. Perhaps it would be better to say: "rely on removing components that produce the smallest loss of quality for the given bitrate." All lossy compression results in some loss of quality. How perceptible that is depends on the amount and type of compression, the quality of the playback system, and the listener's ears.

Tom

 

Let's see, with me it's 52 years of firearms, power tools, airplanes, diesel boat engines, and age. The cilia in my cochlea look like the trees at Tunguska. Morse Code is about the right compression for me. Even so, I still can hear the difference between good MP3 files and crappy ones.

Tom

 

Give it another ten years

 

Are we sure about that part?

I had read in the manual that you can't play a combination CD-Audio and MP3/WMA disk, but I had interpreted that a disk with a combination of MP3 and WMA files would be fine.

 

I think you're right. It's been a while since I read that section of the manual and, on re-reading, it says you can't mix music files, and MP3/WMA files, which is different from what I wrote.

That said, mixing MP3/WMA files can be problematic due to the different bitrates/sound levels they may have been recorded at. I had to go back and use normalizing software on the MP3s I burned for my Prius because the sound levels were wildly different. I found myself constantly changing the volume. WMA's are reputed to have better sound at lower bitrates, while MP3's seem to have more universal support.

So yes, apparently they can be mixed. Maybe I'll try it and report back.

 

If by "that commonly known techno fruit company" you mean that you get your music from the iTunes Store, they are in AAC format. That format is not recognized by the mp3 player in the Prius. Furthermore, if your purchases are rights protected (as most iTunes purchases are), you will not be able to convert them to mp3 format using iTunes before burning them to a CD.

 

Talk to me in simple terms. Can I plug my ipod into the auxiliary jack and press play, and the sound will come out the stereo?

And where is the auxiliary jack? Is that the jack inside the center console compartment?

 

yes.yes.yes.yes

 

You don't need to burn a CD to discover this limitation. Just go to iTunes Preferences and set importing to mp3. Then go to any protected audio file in your library and try to convert to mp3. You'll get a message that advises that you can't convert protected files to another format.