Hi all,

I have a 2007 Ford Escape with the Ford Audiophile-6 Stereo system. Sweet sounding system but not all my MP3s burned on a cd will play. In the Ford manual there is a comment about incompatibility issues but I find it hard to believe that some songs are read by the player while others are not. All the MP3s have been made by Tunebites. All are 128, 16 bit. I use Nero 7 to burn. I did use Roxio to make a MP3 CD but the stereo says it's a bad disc but it plays perfect in my wifes stereo. I'm sure there are some Ford owners here. Does anyone else have this problem and have you been able to make MP3 CDs that work fully in the Ford stereo? I don't want to have to buy a new stereo just yet, just had the Escape for 7 months. I have an MP3 player and use a FM transmitter to play it in the car but living in the Chicago area with all it's radio stations I have to constantly fine tune the station. So, after being long winded here I'm looking for some tips that may help.

Hi steve and Wc , I don't use anything other than EAC for ripping/backing up my sounds, try it...
Not sure about other proggys you mentioned as I don't use Tunebites or Roxio, but you'll get responds soon enough...maybe you should buy a Chevy LOL...justakidding stevesalookin.....

Hi t0nee1,

Thanks for the reply. I use Tunebite because I have Rhapsody, don't need to say more. I looked at EAC and may give it a try for ripping.

Cool!

Hi,Basically there are two restrictions:
The bitrate (inluding VBR/CBR options) is one thing. The other one is the data format (ISO, file name restrictions etc) that has to be applied for burning the disc. Both should be mentioned in the manual.
Another issue might be the media you are using, car stereos are sometimes very picky about that.

Michael

Unfortunately the manual metions neither, just that there may be incompatability issues. I am using TDK CD-Rs. All my MP3s are at 128 CBR. All cds I make play great in the computer, the dvd player or my wife's new Sony car stereo. I am going to try and shorten all the file names and see what happens. It's just frustrating to have a higher end factory stereo system and you get nada on mp3s.

That's bad. You may have a look here: http://fordfcsd.wunderman.be/default.asp There are manuals for European Ford cars.
As you wrote previously there seem to some discs, that worked. Is there any difference to the non-working ones?
You might also try different media, at least to sort out if these issues are related to your method of authoring.

Michael

I used a Maxell CD-R on Two. I forgot on one I had 34 songs and all seemed to play. On the 2nd only 75% of the songs played. On TDK media w/lightscribe, I set up folders for 8 albums. On the 1st four all songs played. On the next four half the songs played in each folder. Now between the songs there are some long file names, which have played, and some short file names which haven't, so I'm not real confident that shortening all will fix any issue. As far as programs I am sticking with Nero. A Roxio created MP3 CD on the TDK media was totally unreadable in the Ford but worked fine in my wife's stereo.

I guess at some point I'll have to fork out money for an aftermarket stereo but I don't feel I should.

Oh, and thanks for the manual link but the stereos are way different.

I finally got a full MP3 CD to play on a Ford Stereo CD system. This is what I did:

1. Reconverted all the MP3's at 128.
2. Set Nero burn speed to 16X.
3. Burn Disc-at-Once, not Track-at-Once.

Sound simple? Lot's of reading and a few wasted CD's got me to this point. Why did I reconvert the MP3's? Well, I used Tunebite to digitally record DRM files from Rhapsody. I didn't know if it was an issue but I figured it was worth a shot. Tunebite might not be perfect. End result, every song in every folder play on the car stereo. Even all the tags are there. As the old man said in Monty Python's Holy Grail, "I feel happy! I feel Happy!"

Glad you worked it out

Cheers,
Michael

bah...got to this too late, problem already solved.
I had this problem with a Citroen C3, but it was all related to the speed at which the discs were burned. If I burned them at 8x maximum, everything was fine...above that value, no deal with my stereo
It has nothing to do with the software you used(Tunebite or any other software) to convert them, just with the burner and car stereo

I have an older Ford (2002) and Ive found the biggest issue with discs for me tends to be ISO issues when disc is setup
The Mach MP3 players tend to flip out over naming issues, too many files in a directory, weird characters (eg burn a Jpop or Kpop song and filenames cant be read) etc etc

Bitrates and CBR/VBR issues tend not to pop up so often in my experiance

My player also hates RW media... Im not sure why but...

RW media is hated by most of the cars at least a bit older versions of car stereos really have a problem with them. I have a new Sony mp3 player now that eats any kind of burning(speed, content, disc). Seems like they made them better in the end