H wrote:
I'm getting my new MP3 HU (Kenwood Z838W) this Christmas from SWMBO.

As this unit is for use in a 1998 Land Rover Discovery TDi (not the
quietest of machines), what bit rate would you guys use to compress
the files?

I normally use 192Kbps for use in my MP3 player I use on my bike, but
I hear many people using 256 in cars.

Well encoded 192Kbps files should be fine for everything but perhaps the
occasional freak tune that is consistently loud and has had a lot of
compression appied in the studio during production. I always encode at
192Kbps, as one of the players I use my mp3s in seems to be a little poor at
buffering VBR files. I have mp3s from other people's rips at higher bit
rates, ie 256, 320, but have not noticed a quality difference yet (I have
not *tried* to analyse the difference, it's just that no obvious difference
has been noticed); I do however, definitely notice when I can't fit as much
on a CDR because of them.

Also - not having used an in-car MP3 player before, how can I store
the files? Will it only read from the root of the CD, or can I put
my albums in named folders on the CD?

Different players will have different guidelines. If you intend to put a few
different albums on each CDR, it's probably best to put each album in it's
own folder directly below the root directory. It's also good practice to get
your encoder software to prefix each track's filename with the track number,
including any leading zeros, that should preserve the file ordering, as some
people have problems with different burners and players reordering all their
mp3s into alphabetical order. You could fiddle the same with the album's
folder name if you wanted each 'CD' to appear in a specific order when
burnt. If you just have a random collection of mp3s then you might as well
just stick them all in root, or one level below in separate genre folders.