Gargos

I just had my CD player swapped out for the MP3 CD player yesterday. I had posted back and forth a bit about a month or so ago about how my CD player was skipping. Burning at slower speeds and using different media helped the problem, but it still didn't completely alleviate it. I still had a scratching sound in the background and the occasional skip, although noticably less with the slower speeds and other media.

Well, last night I tested out my MP3 player with a CD I had burned quite some time ago and listened to in my previous car repeatedly. The CD worked great until about 10 minutes into my ride home from the installation. The song I was listening to started to skip, quite loud at times, sounding like an encoding error despite me knowing that EVERY song on that disc was 100% error free. It also refused to even read folder #6 of the 7 on it, despite that folder not having anything odd going on such as strange characters in the filenames or extra long filenames. Getting nervous about how I had a defective player I decided to experiment with similar settings to the other stock CD player. Sure enough, during an hour and 20 minutes round trip tonight with a CD that was burned on different media and a slower burn speed, I encountered only 1 minor glitch in 1 song. I could probably forgive that, but I'd rather have it not skip at all.

My point is just that I shouldn't have to take all these precautions. I should be able to burn a CD, especially an MP3 CD with "Joe's Generic Brand Media", at 52X and this player should have no problem playing it. My old car didn't have a problem, and I had that unit in the car for 2 and a half years and it's still never skipped ONCE for me on ANYTHING. For the price I paid for this stock Mazda unit, I could have gotten a nice professional player from JVC or SONY with a colorful, animated display and it would have worked on anything I threw at it. Instead, I'm forced to pay the same price for nothing but a metal box that borrows the stock HUD and yet chokes on anything that I dare burn above 8X, the slowest my computer will even let me burn the media at, and even then, still isn't guaranteed to be perfect as evidenced by my one minor skip. I haven't tested the CD-R Audio CD capabilities yet because, let's face it, why would I burn an audio CD when I can burn 7 audio CD's on one MP3 disc? Chances are, I would expect it to be not much different than before. Afterall, if it can't buffer and play a 6-10 MB MP3 file, what are the odds that it can stream a CD audio track that encompasses approximately 10X the bandwidth for a single song?

I don't know, I just felt like ranting a little bit because I felt pretty cheated last night. Up until now, I haven't heard of many issues, if any at all with the MP3 CD player unit. But since I was able to more or less prove my theory about the media and burn speed, I suppose the natural conclusion to make is that the unit's quality just isn't up to par and can't handle today's technology like... everybody else.

QBallz

It could be your burner. Try having a friend burn one for you. I use the crappiest CD's know to man and havn't had any problems. PLEXTOR burners = WINNAR!

Gargos

This all just kind of goes back to the whole deal from last month with the stock CD player. The Mazda unit is the only device in God's known world that won't play the files properly. I can listen to the CD's on the computer, or on the laptop, or in my other car (which I still haven't sold), or my portable MP3 CD player, or my DVD player and none of them produce any errors at all. These problems with the skipping audio and "static" in the stock CD player and skipping and beeping on the MP3 CD player are only resident in the Mazda players.

swoope

iTrader: (5)

never had a problem with my stock one. and i often use rw's just for a ride mix.

beers

Vertigo-1

iTrader: (3)

Mines with a plain CDP has been absolutely flawless to date. I play nothing but CDRs for fear of the thing possibly eating a CD, it's just a precaution I take with any car's CDP. And I've done burns at well over 8x myself. If it matters, I use EAC for ripping, Winamp for MP3 -> WAV conversion, and Nero for burning.

DarkBrew

I have not had any problems with my 6 disc unit except for some poorly burned CD-Rs. The disks I have burned at high speed have all worked very well.
I would suspect your burner.

Butch Brown

I use a yamaha burner 44X with no problems.

Nubo

My 8's CD player skipped too much to be forgiven. Sometimes an expansion joint would make it go "huh"?. And that is even with commercial audio CDs. Seemed like absolutely no buffering going on; maybe no oversampling. Either that or some flaky internal connection. Ah well. I installed the Dension iPod adapter (aka 'Neo Ion') and it's no longer an issue .

Mikelikes2drive

i burn cds and have never had a problem with skipping with my single disk cd player or my 6 disk

JeRKy 8 Owner

Sometimes I have problems with an MP3 that the Mazda MP3 player will just refuse to play for no reason, yet the MP3 will play fine on a computer or another car's player. This happens very rarely though, and when it does, I just find/create another version of the MP3 if I really care that much about the song. I still haven't figured out why there's always 1 out of 300 MP3s that it can't play, but it happens so take that into consideration and deal with it.

I usually use CDRWs to test out the songs in the MP3 player before I finally burn them to a CDR to make sure everything comes out perfect. I don't burn CDRs until I have enough MP3s to fill up an entire disc, which means I typically go several months rewriting on the same single CDRW until I've reached capacity. Also burn at 12x or 16x to be safe and they always come out perfect.

Again, you gotta have patience because Mazda isn't exactly on the up and up when it comes to latest technology. When they released the navigation system there were already cars here with navs that were three times faster and had a lot more functionality like Acura and Infiniti.