CD-MP3 car stereo

Christmas 2002, my lovely wife bought me a CD-player for the car I commute in. After 110,000 miles I finally decided the car was a keeper and deserved a stereo upgrade.

She got me a Panasonic CQ-DP171U, obviously named by engineers. It distinguished itself by playing MP3's which was a rarity on affordable MP3 decks at the time. While I enjoyed this new deck immensely with CD's, especially audio books from the library, I never got one MP3 disc to play until today.

What's the trick you ask. Well as the warranty wound down late last year, I sent it in to be repaired. Audio King now Ultimate Electronics sent off the deck to a local repair company who does warranty work for Panasonic. The repair tech had the same problems I had with my disc (which worked in other players, BTW) but couldn't figure it out. After a long wait he got through to a engineer at Panasonic who indicated you couldn't play anything with a bitrate greater than 128 kbs. So he sent it back. At this point Audio King promptly lost the deck for 3 months. My wife finally tracked it down in some dusty back room somewhere. After it was re-installed I dilligently burned a new disc, using MusicMatch, which has the option to downsample to 128 kbs. Still no luck. Then I decided to look at the files more closely. Sure enough they were still at their native 192 or 256 kbs rate. Of course software defects! So I downloaded LAME and RazorLame for Windows and downsampled to a verifiable 128kbs, burned another disc and ran out to the car.

Lo and behold it worked. I was playing MP3's in my car. Watch out world.

Now if only Panasonic had mentioned on their manual or on their web site, I could have been playing MP3's for 15 months but no! Hope this info is useful for someone else.

BTW, all my MP3's are legal, I have the original CD, and am only space shifting and I don't share. I would like to share if it were legal.