Null Bits
So that’s it, one term of school down. There were some unforseen complications in the whole Marty-400-CD operation. First, Marty will probably not be around this weekend. Second, how to derive titles from CD’s that have an entire album, but them some acoustic cuts at the end - will CDDB or freedb recognize these cds? Doubtful. What to do about titles then. Additionally, I discovered that these MP3’s need to be burned at about 192 kbps in order for the CDP-CX455 to seek through the seconds with some amount of efficiency; should I burn at 128 anyways, and disregard seek issues? I think maybe the 192 will go only on the dance tracks - those can always use some seeking.
On top of all this, the ID3 tags need to be version 1, which is not all that hard. However, there is a catch. Winamp, Justin’s program (unfortunately), and other programs, insert non-null fields into the ID3 tags, in order to fill space after artist, title, etc. The Sony CX455 interprets these as spaces. When one only has 13 characters to display at a time, watching the blank space scroll until one reaches the next part of the tag is a little nerve racking. Thankfully, there is a solution. Other programs complete the ID3 tag using null fields, as they should. The player displays these tags correctly, leaving out the spaces, and making reading the tag much easier. This is a must for large collections of MP3’s. Only problem is, we gotta find an ID3 tagger that will integrate or replace the currect program that will insert these null fields correctly. Consequently, the search continues. On a brighter note, I haven’t heard anything from Justin yet, and in this case no news is good news. Perhaps this will still work out. I’m still working on a plan “B”. This plan has the potential to be far more time consuming and frusterating - thus I am in favor of plan A. Maybe I’ll go call Justin now.