Tried to get an audio DVD to work for me this afternoon. PCM could see all the artist folders/albums/tracks, but only wanted to play the first album on the disk.

How do you have your DVD indexed?

 

That is how I had organized my dvd as well-- artist, album, track. Worked fine. Can you select a track in the track list other than the first one or can you select another album or artist and then a track there? Until the dvd is indexed you have to use the up arrow on the PCM screen instead of "music search" to navigate. (BTW, you say audio dvd-- you do mean a dvd you have ripped with mp3s or some other acceptable format instead of an actual audio dvd right?)

 

DVD ripped with audio tracks.

The PCM recognizes all of the files and sub-folders, track titles, etc. But when I go through the menu on-screen and try to select anything other than the first album on the disk it tells me that the selected track is unreadable.

I'll go back and check the format of the individual tracks, just to make sure that some aren't mp3's, and others are some other format.

 

OK, it looks like file format is the issue. The majority of the tracks are m4a, not mp3.

Next question... best way to convert m4a's to mp3's (ideally as the files are written to DVD so I don't have to use all mp3's for my iTunes library)?

 

I use the converter app which is part of the dbpoweramp package. Very flexible, supports multiple cores...I have everything in flac and then go to mp3, wma or whatever depending on where I need it..

 

The PCM will only play files that are in its supported set. MP3 is the safest bet for use in the non-ideal internal environment of a 911 car, and gives you a lot of storage on 4 or 8GB discs.

I have my system set to shuffle which works rather well.

 

Here's a list of audio formats the PCM will playback.

 

Thanks for posting.

And notice, for all of them, you could pick some compression/setting combo that the PCM doesn't support.. .none of them are guaranteed across the board I think... though if you encode as DTS, DD, or MLP you probably don't have the flexibility to hose it up. So pick a sane, common encoding because you cannot update the codec in the PCM.