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[chopdog]

I haven't used the "make a data disc" feature for some time and as I am about to buy an Alpine head unit with WMA and MP3 DVD capabilities, I thought I would have another go at it. Delighted to see it has come along a long way - particularly useful if the WMA re-coding as most of my stuff is lossless WMA, but in car systems (to the best of my knowledge) are yet to embrase lossless.

So, with this in mind, when you add files to a disc queue, when you are going to be re or transcoding the audio to another format or data rate, there is no way of knowing how much room you are going to have left on the disc after the recoding to smaller files has happened.

So, therefore, would there be a way to re-code in the fly whilst you are working on what next to add to your disc, so you can make sure your disc is crammed to the max, rather than left very empty. You can force it to start recoding even though it says you are over target on the size, and if you guess well, it may just fit......

Ideas ? That would really polish off this section nicely.

[Alex B]

You could collect the files to a playlist first and use a constant bitrate when transcoding.
Just monitor the total playback time and keep it below the disc limit.

Here is a table of the approximate maximum playback times for a 700 MB disc:

Code: [Select]

  Bitrate        Time
128 kbps   12 h 26 min
160 kbps    9 h 57 min
192 kbps    8 h 17 min
256 kbps    6 h 13 min
320 kbps    4 h 58 min
Leave some safe margin. Files are always a bit bigger than their theoretical size because of the tags.

I have saved my car/portable CD burning playlists. They have been useful afterwards.