Aiwa CDC-MP3 Car MP3-CD Player

MP3-CD's
The big question on most people's minds is obviously "how does the CDC-MP3 handle MP3 playback?" After all, the big draw of this unit is the MP3 playback and that's the exact reason it grabbed our attention here at AnandTech.

As should be obvious by now, the CDC-MP3 plays MP3's that have been burned to CD (both CD-R and CD-RW are supported). The manual states that CD's should be burned in ISO9660 format, but we had no problem using the Joliet file system that most CD burning applications use under Windows for long filename support. Note that CD's burned with packet writing software (e.g. DirectCD) are not supported, but multisession (with up to 5 sessions) is supported.

On the CDC-MP3, long file names up to 32 characters can be read from discs written in either ISO9660 or Joliet format. Rest assured that if you go over 32 characters, you can still read the MP3's, but the filename will be truncated on the display. MP3 files are simply recognized by the .mp3 extension on the filename. Folders, up to 8 levels deep, are also supported.

The CDC-MP3 supports MP3's encoded from 32kbps - 320kbps, including variable bitrate (VBR) files. If you assume 128kbps encoding, that's 1MB per minute of audio, which in turn means you can store over 10 hours of music on one CD-R(W). Obviously that introduces the problem of how to organize over 150 songs on a single CD.

Aiwa has taken the approach that each directory is treated like a CD in a CD changer, while each file is like a track on a CD. To navigate this structure, simply use the Album/Disc up and down buttons (Presets 1 and 2) to go through directories and the track up/down buttons to move between songs.

Files and directories are played back in alphabetical order by filename, so if you want a specific order to your music, you should probably name the first song as "01 - filename.mp3" followed by "02 - filename.mp3" and so on. There is no problem recognizing spaces, the upper and lower case alphabet, and most common symbols. You'll want to put your directories in order like this as well to make things as easy as possible to find.

The CDC-MP3 is able to read song title and artist information from version 1.x ID3 tags. The 32 character limit allowable character rules that applied to filenames also apply to ID3 tags, but this time, the length limitation is imposed by the ID3 spec, not the CDC-MP3.