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I had a cd with .mp3s on it that I listen to at work but when I put it in my new head unit I got "Error-23" which I looked up in the manual and it means format not readable or something. All I did was burn .mp3s on it. Does it matter if you burn it as a music or a data cd?

And if I want to use folders, how do you do that? Do you have to number them like 01, 02, etc?

 
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data cd is the way to burn it. Otherwise it won't read in players

 
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Ya a music CD is just that, a music CD. Since you burn the .mp3's as .mp3 files, you need to make it a data CD

 
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Blah.

Do you have to use folders?

Music cd means it's using .wavs, right?

 
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Ya I would imagine.. they burn CD audio tracks or something but I think it's the wave format they use.

You don't HAVE to use folders but it's a good idea. If you have like 200 songs on one CD do you want them all in the same folder? I have one disc like that and searching through it is the biggest pain in the *** ever. What I like to do is get whole albums off the internet and put 5-6 albums and maybe a few singles in their own folder on a disc

 
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yah, I organize types of music in folders, or group one band in a folder, or whatever. You can make as many folders as you like. It helps in organizing, instead of searching through hundreds of songs like he mentioned above

 
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I burned a new cd and it worked fine, even tho it only had like 6 .mp3s on it.

I guess my player doesn't display some foreign letters. Björk displays as Bj??rk. Hmm.

 
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They don't have accents and stuff. For folders, just make what you want. I usually make a folder for each artist and title it the name of the artist. If I make more than one floder stack (folder within a folder), it takes forever to load the cd for the first time. But maybe it's just my deck.

 
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Yeah some decks browse MP3's slower than others... my JVC was uber quick, and my new Clarion is somewhat slower.

 
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Your radio either has an MP3 decoder which means it can actually decompress mp3 files on the fly and play an mp3 file burned onto a cd in data fromat. OR, your radio doesn't have the decoder but can play FROM a cdr source, in which case it can play cds burned as audio format using .WAV files. OR, you radio simply cannot read FROM CDR sources which means regardless of how the CD was made, your radio can't even "See" the information. .Wav files are not ACTUALLY what you have when you buy a CD in the store, but they are the laymans' computer file which most closely replicates song files found on regular CDS. The reason for this is because .WAV files do not use any sort of hypercompression like MP3s do. Thats why if you convert an MP3 to a wav, it goes from a 4mb file to a 35mb file or similar. The huge benefit in using MP3 decoder radios is that you can leave the format compressed on a CD, therefore you can store like 120+ songs on one disc and play it with arguably negligable sound quality loss. Remember, since you are burning MP3 onto cdr as a data disc, You can also place the mp3s into folders. You can name the folders whatever you want and if the head unit can recognize folders, you will have a two-tiered way to search for your files. You will be able to browse through files, and you will be able to skip folders as well. So, lets say you wanted to put all 4 of your AC/DC albums onto one disc, you would name each folder the name of the album, IE "AC/DC - The Razor's Edge" and you could skip between "albums" on the head unit. Alpine has a system in place where the head unit actually puts back some of what is taken out in compression on the fly to make the files sound more like cd files. Works ok, but if I am listening to something for sound quality, its a .wav, If I am listening for pure entertainment, I'd rather just deal with the loss and listen to it without any sort of additional enhancement. Hope that helps.

 
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nice post J ^^^^^