Greetings,

I've been working on this for a while now and getting tips from this forum. I have it working pretty well now. I have an archive with a program I wrote to encode .wav files to .mp2 as well as a program to create the data.txt file. The only problem is that I don't have a way to host the file. Can someone with hosting capabilities email me and I can reply back with it? (unless someone knows a good free file hosting site). My code is all in VB6. It's kinda sloppy, but it spits out a file that works. I use Winamp to write .wav from .mp3 and use TooLame to encode the songs from .wav to .mp2. I included a copy of TooLame in the archive. I've made 3 cd's now and they all seem to work great. Songplay is always random though, and I'm unsure as to why this is. Help on that part would be great. So here it is, I hope it works as well for you all as it has for me.

Step 1. Get all of the songs you want on the disc in to 44.100khz, 16bit, mono format. It's easy in Winamp. Hit Ctrl-p and go to output plugins. Specify output path, click convert to format, and select pcm and 44,100khz, 16bit, mono. Exit out of prefrences and load up all your .wav files in a play list. Play through it once and you have your raw data.

Step 2. Encode all .wav files to .mp2 files. I do this with TooLame using the options "-b 80 e". So it would look like "toolame.exe -b 80 e inputfile.wav outputfile.mp2". I included a front end in the package. Just find the file you want and double click on it. It outputs to the same directory as your source files.

Step 3. Create your data.TXT file. Everyone knows that this is the worst part of the whole thing. I played with this forever, trying all sorts of things I read on this site as well as borrowing a number of cd's to compare files. Included in the archive is code I wrote to create the file. Fill in the boxes for title and artist. Double click to add whichever files you want. If you like use the truncate boxes to cut off the file extensions and the 00xx_ that winamp adds to the file names. It just makes it look pretty in the player at work but it's not necesary as the program will check for appropriate length and cut your title/author if necessary. Specify an output path for the data.txt file and hit make.

Step 4. Build your playdisc.AUD file. Open up a text editor like notepad and hit "." about 2,048 times. Save the file (I'll use c:\bs.bs for the example). Check your file size and make sure that it is 2048 bytes exactly. Windows won't give you an acurate number but fake DOS in windows will. Next, punch in these commands. I'm using XP pro but i'm pretty sure these commands will work in most versions of the fake DOS boxes in windows.

cd (directory your .mp2 files are in)

copy /b c:\bs.bs + "(file one)" + "(file two)" + "(file three)" playdisc.aud

That command would work for 3 files. If you're using long file names or your file names have spaces in them, use quotes around the whole path and file name. Make sure you use the same order that you used in your data.txt file.

Step 5. Burn data.TXT and playdisc.AUD on to a cd. I'm not sure if the file names are case sensative or not but all the cds have the prefix lowercase and the extension capitol.

Step 6. Turn off "Bebe Williams sings the same christmas songs over and over for hours" at closing time and put in Led Zeppelin.

So that's it. Pretty sure I included everything. my email is phx@san.rr.com
If someone could either host the file for me or recommend a good site I'm glad to share it. This should be public information. I'll check the site if anyone has questions.


phx