Car Stereo recommendations?

[Undertoad]

Damn, you're right! The dimmed items are NEWS, AF, PTY, and TA and I don't believe I've ever seen any of them lit up.

In fact every illustration in the manual blatantly ignores these items as if they didn't exist. I'm going to guess these were planned for some higher model.

What I learned yesterday, that I didn't realize before: using the "DISP" button, while playing back MP3, you can *specify* whether the scrolling display shows the file name, folder name, title, disc name, etc.

From a first glance it looks like the "title" setting gets its information from the ID3 tag. This makes it more important to use a ripping program that fills in that information.

When I started ripping I was using cdex, which is supposed to rip CDs with a tremendous level of accuracy before converting them to mp3. But cdex didn't store files using the filenames I wanted, and often errored out for seemingly no reason. And I don't think it fills in the ID tag. Also, with cdex I had one mp3 conversion that seemed to go wrong and resulted in a burst of terrible noise. Exactly the kind of noise you don't want while driving down the road at high speeds: ugly digital noise at twice the volume of the song.

So I searched out the shareware offerings and found one that has been doing the job. It's "AltoMP3 Maker". It will rip the first 12 tracks of any disc without registration, but I registered it (at $19.95) because it was easy and does exactly what I want. If there are accuracy problems I can't detect any.

Also, it uses the Lame mp3 encoder, which is supposed to be the best.

I mention all this stuff just in case anyone finds it useful.