New format for show CDs (starving student special)

[Subarubrat]

Shane, one thing to consider is that MANY car and other MP3 players won't play MP3 files as large as the show. I love the idea of the show only CDs to get the MP3s on a nice tight package. I have last year's DVD and I burned a few shows to a CD to play in the car. I have a fairly new Alpine in the STI and a Pioneer 2nd or 3rd gen MP3 head unit in the Diablo and neither one will recognize a file that large. I also tried to play the show from the DVD's show directory on a portable DVD player in the basement and it would not recognize them. I grabbed a MP3 file splitter and busted it into 10 or so segments and then it played just fine. Perhaps distributing the shows broke up into a few parts might help?

[miner2049er]

Shane, one thing to consider is that MANY car and other MP3 players won't play MP3 files as large as the show. I love the idea of the show only CDs to get the MP3s on a nice tight package. I have last year's DVD and I burned a few shows to a CD to play in the car. I have a fairly new Alpine in the STI and a Pioneer 2nd or 3rd gen MP3 head unit in the Diablo and neither one will recognize a file that large. I also tried to play the show from the DVD's show directory on a portable DVD player in the basement and it would not recognize them. I grabbed a MP3 file splitter and busted it into 10 or so segments and then it played just fine. Perhaps distributing the shows broke up into a few parts might help?

I have an mp3 player in my car and the problem I had was not the size of the shows but the variable bit rate.

Try converting one to fixed bit rate and play that.

[Shane R. Monroe]

None of my shows should be VBR ... That's unusual. Perhaps the Real Player converter somehow was set for VBR when I remastered the shows in MP3.

I'll have to look into that - I never use VBR for JUST this reason.

[Flare]

I have an old (2004) Panasonic car stereo (I even wrote a review of it) and it plays large MP3 files without problems. It even plays VBR files just fine.

My only concern is that this unit doesn't REW and FF as fast as I would like; so if I am at 200 or so minutes into the show and by mistake I press BACK; I swear like a sailor and then I FF for like 15 minutes to reach 200 minutes again.

That's why I usually split the show into 10 minute chunks using Cool MP3 Splitter.

[Shane R. Monroe]

I wouldn't break the show up myself - many reasons, lamented at great length ... Those that seem to need it split for technical reasons appear to already do so.

[Flare]

I wouldn't break the show up myself - many reasons, lamented at great length ... Those that seem to need it split for technical reasons appear to already do so.

I also lament having to break the show for myself. It creates this 2 second gap between segments and it usually happens when you are saying something important.

I don't split it however, when I put it on the PDA, because the slider helps me go to the timestamp I want immediately.

[Shane R. Monroe]

Yeah, my Virgin MP3 player does proper "FFW" so I can get to whatever part I need it.

[miner2049er]

Moonshell works great with the slider for DSRadio too.

[Flare]

I don't own an MP3 player so my available handheld to listen to RGR (and DSR) is the PDA with AeroPlayer running on it.

The problem with this software is that they don't consider that some audio files might run for more than 1 hour.

If an RGR show is 4:00:10 long... I see it as 00:10 only... it resets back to 00:00 after every 1 hour jump... lame.