Best media to use in car CD player.

uart

Hi, my wife has just bought a new car and it has a fairly basic CD player that can play CD's CD-R and CD-RW as long as they're plain audio, it wont touch mp3's.

If the thing could have played mp3's then I would have just made one disc with a whole butt load of songs that would keep her happy or ages. But since I have to burn plain audio CD's I'll need to either make a collection or perhaps make a few "compilations" on CD-RW that I can re-burn with new material from time to time.

I'm just interested in what people think as the best option for burning audio CD's for a car. Should I :

1. Burn just a small number of "best of compliations" using CD-RW and erase and re-burn with fresh material from time to time.

2. Burn a collection of CD-R's using cheap nasty media, since it will probably suffer a lot of abuse and die in the car anyway.

3. Burn a collection of CD-R's on my best quality media (verb datalife metal azo) and hope that they stand up to the rigors of car use (possibly very high summer temperatures and high UV exposure as I live in Australia).


What would you do ?

rdgrimes

#2

KyRoWire

Heh, in the hot hot sun, cheap media won't last a week. Aim for some mid-range media, like RiTEK. It's not worth wasting high quality media in cars, but you're probably better off not wasting your money on the cheapest studd either.

Find the cheapest not-quite-crap media around and use that

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reptile

I was in a similar situation and thought about this recently. My 02 Civic's CD player won't play CD-RW, but it will play CD-R. (No MP3). I was looking at a replacement player that handles CD-RW and MP3, but it cost $100.

For the money, I can buy 5 spindles of decent CD-Rs at 20 bucks a pop (Ritek or Verbatim from Newegg, for example) and just work my way through those. I seriously doubt I'll need more than 500 music CDs for car listening.

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Plextor PX-W2410A (24x IDE CD-R/RW)
Sony CDU-920S (2x SCSI CD-R)

uart

Thanks for the responses guys. Yep I think I'll go for option two, I've got a spindle of Plasmon CD-R's that seem ok. I'll see how these go for the car and keep my datalife-plus verbs for more important stuff.

ExpertTech

Think of the convenience of not having to change CDs while driving After I bought my $100 Sony MP3 player, I keep about 5-10 CDs with me and keep switching em. I cannot imagine going back to an Audio-only cd player. Just my thought though.

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QuaiBoy

Also a vote for #2. That's what I do, since my wife has no intention of ever returning the discs to the binder. It's ok though when a reburn costs next to nothing. ;-)

-Evan-

rdgrimes

I keep a collection of about 20 CD's in my car in the desert. Lots of heat and abuse. The discs that have lasted the longest are cheap CMC. The discs which have failed the soonest are TY (presumably due to heat).

You can also creat the discs and burn, then convert them to MP3 for storage on your hard drive, then re-create audio CD's when they fail.