Alpine CDE-9870R owner manual About MP3, What is MP3?

About MP3

CAUTION

Except for private use, duplicating audio data (including MP3 data) or distributing, transferring, or copying it, whether for free or for a fee, without permission of the copyright holder is strictly prohibited by the Copyright Act and by international treaty.

What is MP3?

MP3, whose official name is “MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3”, is a compression standard prescribed by the ISO, the International Standardization Organization and MPEG which is a joint activity institution of the IEC.

MP3 files contain compressed audio data. MP3 encoding is capable of compressing audio data at extremely high ratios, reducing the size of music files to as much as one-tenth their original size. This is achieved while still maintaining near CD quality. The MP3 format realises such high compression ratios by eliminating the sounds that are either inaudible to the human ear or masked by other sounds.

Method for creating MP3 files

Audio data is compressed by using MP3 specified software. For details on creating MP3 files, refer to the user’s manual for that software.

MP3 files that can be played back by this device have the file extension “mp3”. Files with no extension cannot be played back.

Supported playback sampling rates and bit rates

MP3

Sampling rates: 48 kHz, 44.1 kHz, 32 kHz, 24 kHz, 22.05 kHz,

	16 kHz, 12 kHz, 11.025 kHz, 8 kHz
Bit rates:	8 - 320 kbps

This device may not play back correctly depending on sampling rates.

ID3 tags

This device supports ID3 tag v1 and v2. If tag data is in an MP3 file, this device can display the title (track title), artist name, and album name ID3 tag data.

This device can only display single-byte alphanumeric characters (up to 30 for ID3 tags) and the underscore. For non- supported characters, “NO SUPPORT” is displayed.

The tag information may not be correctly displayed, depending on the contents.

Producing MP3 discs

MP3 files are prepared, then written to a CD-R or CD-RW using CD-R writing software. A disc can hold up to 510 files/folders (including Root Folders), and the maximum number of folders is 255.

Playback may not be performed if a disc exceeds the limitations described above.

Media supported

The media that this device can play back are CD-ROMs, CD-Rs, and CD-RWs.

Corresponding File Systems

This device supports discs formatted with ISO9660 Level 1 or Level 2.

Under the ISO9660 standard, there are some restrictions to remember.

The maximum nested folder depth is 8 (including the root directory). The number of characters for a folder/file name is limited.

Valid characters for folder/file names are letters A-Z (all caps), numbers 0-9, and ‘_’ (underscore).

This device also can play back discs in Joliet, Romeo, etc., and other standards that conform to ISO9660. However, sometimes the file names, folder names, etc., are not displayed correctly.

Formats supported

This device supports CD-ROM XA, Mixed Mode CD, Enhanced CD (CD-Extra) and Multi-Session.

This device cannot correctly play back discs recorded with Track At Once or packet writing.

Order of files

Files are played back in the order that the writing software writes them to the disc. Therefore, the playback order may not be what is expected. Verify the writing order in the software’s documentation. The playback order of the folders and files is as follows.

Root folder
Folder	MP3 File

*The folder No./folder Name will not be displayed if no file is contained in the folder.

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