Thanks for the prezzie, Joe!

I'm not too sure if I should post this here or over in Technology, but since it's all to do with MP3 files and CDs, I'll give here a try.

My new car's stereo plays CDs with MP3 files. I know nothing about making my CDs into MP3 files, nor about burning them onto CDs using the plain old CD burner I have on my desktop Dell. How do I do this, and do I need special CDs or can I use the blank ones I've used to create dubs for friends and family?

My new car's stereo plays CDs with MP3 files. I know nothing about making my CDs into MP3 files, nor about burning them onto CDs using the plain old CD burner I have on my desktop Dell. How do I do this, and do I need special CDs or can I use the blank ones I've used to create dubs for friends and family?

You can use the blank ones. You should be able to burn a data CD of MP3s and the stereo should be able to see them.

I think most of us use iTunes. You will need to configure iTunes to rip as MP3 (by default it's AAC), but that's pretty easy; it's in the options.

I had an mp3 player in my Focus. What I'd generally do is burn, say, 10 albums of mp3s to a CD, organized by putting each album in a separate directory. The mp3 player (it was the first car mp3 player Sony offered) had the ability to skip forward and backward through directories as well as individual files (songs). If it was a compilation CD, I'd just make up a half a dozen directories and put a bunch of songs in each. This worked out much easier than just throwing a bunch of songs on a CD without a directory structure, as in that case I could only advance one song at a time, which was a pain when there were up to 200 songs on one CD.

If your mp3 player supports ID3 tags, make sure you have them correctly set for your mp3s. If not, you might need some sort of naming scheme in order to get songs to play in the correct order (if that matters to you). On my player, songs played in file order and it used the old DOS 8.3 naming convention, so I made sure each mp3 file started with a number and then had the first 6 characters of the song name.

On an unrelated note, a quick survey:

What Recordings Of The Last 30 Years Do You Consider To Be Sonic Touchstones?

(That is, records which exploited the studio in some new way such that records which came afterwards reflected that new approach to sound. Obvious examples range from Pet Sounds to It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back)

White Light/White Heat

Sgt. Pepper would be an obvious one. I think it's overrated, but I think the studio tricks were still pretty influential.

Never Mind the Bollocks would be another obvious one.

As would Bowie/Eno on Heroes and Low.

Murmur ?

Oh, The Feelies Crazy Rhythms.

Dude, last 30 years.

1975 cutoff.

Dude, last 30 years.

Oops, sorry. Guess I'm stuck in the past.

Oops, sorry. Guess I'm stuck in the past.

Heh. Just yanking your chain. I can easily think of the canonical reinventing-the-studio from the 60s and early 70s. After that I have the nagging feeling that I'm missing a few. Also, while R.E.M. (for example) were widely imitated, I don't think their use of the studio was as innovative as (say) The Smiths.

I do like Ana Ng! Really. I just like those other ones MORE.

There's very little *bad* TMBG, in my opinion.