By WILSON ROTHMAN	E-mail this article to a friend

April 5, 2004

Pioneer Electronics HTZ-740DV Home Theater Home theater in-a-box includes DVD player that can play MP3 CD-Rs PIONEER

Most newer DVD players, from Aiwa to Zenith, can read recorded CDs full of MP3s. Many, including Pioneer's upcoming HTZ-740DV home theater in a box ($800) can also play Windows Media audio files (a.k.a. WMAs).

The challenge is see how many songs you can cram on a disc. In our test, we managed to get 140 gems from the 1970s onto a single CD-R, all of them MP3s ranging in quality (or bit rate) from 96 kilobits per second to 192 Kbps. Since Windows Media can provide tolerably decent sound at bit rates as low as 64 Kbps, you can probably jam over 200 WMA tracks on a disc, but your DVD player and other products might not support it.

The key to playing your MP3 CD on a DVD player is how well you organized your tracks before burning. With Roxio's Easy Media Creator 7 ($99.95 before rebates at roxio.com), you can burn a playlist of music or drag individual tracks you want into separate folders, creating assorted playlists that you can access, one at a time, from a DVD player's on-screen menu.

With iTunes for Mac or Windows, you can turn individual playlists (up to 700MB in size) into MP3 CDs, but you can't use it to create multiple folders on one disc. Actually, iTunes automatically separates the tracks from your playlists into folders of its own making, based on artist. It's nice in a way, but can be painfully divisive.

Most DVD players will clearly display folder and track names taken from the CD. Also like many, the Pioneer model we tested has a simple Program function, which allowed us quickly set the tracks' playing order; it's a function you may recall from the early days of CD players, but now it's 10 to 12 times more useful.

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