Apple's iTunes is an amazing tool for managing your audio collection. The application is one of the best free programs currently available. But the app is not all perfection. For example, creating a flat MP3 CD for play in your car stereo or in your home entertainment centre can be daunting as the software creates a CD with a full folder hierarchy. The folder hierarchy makes it extremely hard for a simple MP3 decoder (such as a car stereo) to see past the first layer of folders, or only sees a maximum amount of folders, thus generating CDs that are useless outside of a computer environment. There is a simple work around, but it's pretty frustrating to know that you have to go through this each and every time in order to create an MP3 disc that works in any standard player.  

 

-Start by going into iTunes preferences and changing your CD burning format to MP3 CD. Then create a simple Playlist with all the songs that you want to burn. Make sure you stay under the 700MB CD-R capacity.

 

-When completed, select all the songs in your regular Playlist and change the genre name to something like “CarMix”.

 

-Create a Smart Playlist and use the following rule; “Genre is CarMix.” The Smart Playlist will now be filled up with all of the songs from your original Playlist.

 

-Make another simple Playlist, then drag and drop all of the songs from your Smart Playlist to your newly created Playlist. With a blank CD-R in the drive (and within the new Playlist folder you’ve just created) hit the “Burn MP3 CD” button on the lower right hand side of the program.

 

Hopefully Apple will one day offer an option to create a flat MP3 CD with a simple click of the button. But chances are slim since this has been the norm now since at least iTunes 4.0.