Aiwa CDC-MP3 Car MP3-CD Player

Now that you've got your MP3-CD's all ready to go, it's time to listen to some music. This is where Aiwa began to make mistakes in their MP3 implementation. The first problem you'll notice is the long delay time before an MP3-CD begins playing - approximately 20-30 seconds for most of the CD's we tested, but Aiwa warns that it can be up to 2 minutes depending on the number of songs and directories on the disc. Unfortunately, every time the unit is turned off, either by the power button or simply turning off your car, this 20-30 second delay is repeated again. The same goes for switching from the tuner to an MP3-CD that's been sitting in the player. It seems that Aiwa should have been able to keep this information in memory, just like they do with the clock time and radio presets - in other words, using the +12V constant power that comes from the car battery.

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Along the same lines, there is a 3-5 second pause when seeking between songs, and about a 2 second pause between simultaneous songs. The seek delays are somewhat understandable, but the pause between simultaneous songs can cause an unexpected pause between tracks that normally flow together on the original CD. The unit should know what song is coming next, so prebuffering could easily solve this minor issue.

Unlike a normal CD head unit (including the CDC-MP3 when it plays standard audio CD's), MP3 playback does not resume where you left off. Rather, the last song that was playing is remembered, but it starts at the beginning of that song. Once again, it seems like this would be something relatively simple to deal with, especially given that the CDC-MP3 takes 20 seconds to get started as it is.

Looking around a disc for a certain song can also be an exercise in frustration. As you navigate through you're music, all you get is an album and track number display, as shown below. It would make much more sense to display the directory names as you move up and down through directories and file names (or ID3 song title) as you search for a particular song.

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We mentioned earlier that variable bitrate (VBR) MP3's are supported, but unfortunately the time display is completely off for these MP3's, running somewhere between normal speed and 3 times as fast at any given time, even within the same song. The manual does warn that the MP3 time display may not be accurate, but this, once again, seems like a problem that could have easily been solved.

For some, the most frustrating part of MP3 navigation on the CDC-MP3 is the fact that you lose so much of the functionality that we've gotten used to on our computers. There is no playlist support, no way to play by genre/artist/etc, and random play only applies to the directory you're currently in. The lack of playlist or play by genre/artist/etc. support is somewhat understandable, but being able to randomize through the whole disc is fundamental and should be a relatively simple thing to implement. This limitation probably stems from the way Aiwa has limited their CD changers to random on one album (remember that an album is equivalent to a directory on an MP3-CD) at a time as well.

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Of course, how this all effects your experience with the CDC-MP3 is all dependent on how you listen to music. If you like to listen to albums straight through, the CDC-MP3 is perfect. The same goes if you are willing to organize your music by genre and randomize through one genre at a time. But for those that listen to music in a variety of different ways, the CDC-MP3 simply is simply not flexible enough.

Another rather odd limitation of the random function is that if you have more than 128 songs in a directory, it must play the first 128 songs before it even touches the second set of 128. This is really only a problem if you want to put all your music in one directory so that you can listen to all of it on random.

Once again, the bottom line is that the CDC-MP3 is designed to play MP3's and it does play them well in our experience. As far as we can tell, if the MP3's are ripped properly they play fine, regardless of which encoder is used. However, MP3's with errors did cause skipping wherever an error existed, whereas computer players, such as Winamp, would just keep going with a slight blip in the music on the same songs. Of course, hitting a big pothole while you're driving is going to cause a skip in the music, just like any other CD head unit. There have been reports across the web of excessive skipping and problems with certain brands of media. All we can report is what we found and that was not the case in our use of the unit.