Burning MP3 CDs

[timmyb]

I have just got an MP3 CD player for my car and am in the process of making some MP3 CDs for it, (over 150 songs :) ) but I have a couple of queries
all the blank CDs I have seen are 700MB and there are a few of my playlists I would like to burn which are around 800MB, can you buy these larger CDs?
my CD player has a button to skip to next album and the instructions say to utilise this, burn a CD with tracks sorted in to albums. I have done this but the player still thinks it is all one album. Is there a way to make sure the CD is split in to albums via iTunes?

can i convert the protected AAC format in to MP3 as I can't burn the AAC format

[chv400]

I do know that 850 MB CDs exist since I've seen them at CompUSA before the only thing is that i havnt seen any recently so you may have to do some hunting around to find a place that sells them but it may be easier to just encode the mp3s at a slightly lower bit rate.

For the album thing I'm not sure about this but i think your CD player may recognize an "album" as a session on the disc, so in order to do make it recognize multiple albums you will probably have to burn multi session CDs with an album on each session.

I think that if you change the importing preference in iTunes to mp3 you should be able to select the AAC tracks and use the advanced menu to convert them the AAC. Converting does not mean they change to AAC what it actually does is makes a copy of the song in the new format so you will need to add the mp3 version of the track which is in the library to the playlist. Also when using the default mp3 settings in itunes it uses Joint Stereo which i personaly do not like you may want to use a custom setting with normal stereo turned on. What joint stereo does is whgen encoding it encodes the right stereo channel normally but then when it encodes the left channel it only encodes the sound data that differs from the right channel onto the left channel which may not be how your song was meant to sound. This is done to make smaller files by having less data to store.