I have on my hard drive 2 versions of the same album, Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. On one albums the quality is 128 KB and on the other it is 320 KB, yet when I load them both up in nero they take up the same amount of space on the cd. Why is this? Shouldn't the bigger, better album take up more space?
Yes the bigger file WILL take up more space. But Nero is converting the .mp3 file back to .cda, and in .cda both files are the same size. If you select "Make MP3 CD" then you will notice that one file will be a little more than twice the size of the other. If you decide to make an MP3 CD remember to make sure that whatever you decide to play it on is capable of the playing MP3 format. I am a car audio specialist and when customers ask about bit rate I always recommend 192 or better
So you're telling me that if I burn the larger album, the music quality will stay at 320 KB? I always assumed Nero automatically converted the MP3s to a default quality. If I burn these songs to an audio Cd, it fills it up half way. This makes me a bit suspicious, is this how much space the songs take on the original retail copy?
I burn alot of MP3 CD,s and typically I get around 120 to 150 songs on each CD (I usually put 5-7 normal audio CD's on one MP3 CD. I do this to prevent clutter in my truck. I can now keep a tremendous amout of music in my truck and only carry 4 or 5 CD,s on me. MP3 is also usefull for backing up a large number of CD's or music files. MP3 is a compressed format. The average song can range from 20,000,000 to 35,000,000 bytes. Where as the same song compressed as an MP3 will be any where from 2,000,000 to 3,500,000 bytes. Nero converts the compressed MP3 back to its original .cda form (no longer .mp3) unless the "MP3 Cd" is selected or you burn the files as a data disc.
Again I am not sure which version of Nero you are using To make a normal CD you would select "Audio CD" To make an MP3 CD you would select "MP3 Disc" If you are using Nero Burning ROM burn as data.