Alpine IDA-X001 - Unsupported MP3 format

[zaph]

My brother in-law gave me this head unit this summer. I installed it and everything works great with the iPod, but if I plug in a USB memory stick, roughly half of my MP3's show up as "Unsupported Format". Some of these MP3's are CD rips that I did with iTunes and others are legal downloads from eMusic.com.

Does anyone know which magic encryption settings I need to convert these MP3s to be supported? I googled on and off for a few months now and tried a few things like avoiding VBR or keeping a low bitrate like 128, but no dice. Some of the MP3's that DO work are VBR or fixed at 192 or higher. So I'm really at a loss. I also use the same encoder as some of the files that work (LAME).

I am assuming the HU uses the iPod's firmware to play tunes on the iPod device and uses its own (less adequate) firmware for USB devices.

Any ideas?

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[Skullz 10+ year member]

Prolly copy right protected material, burn em to a cd and recopy to your drive.

 

[zaph]

eMusic MP3's are DRM free (always have been). Also some of them work, others don't, but I don't think all of their MP3's are encoded exactly the same way.

I am mostly curious to know if anyone was successful at figuring this out. I've seen several posts about it but none with an answer.

 

[raverx3m 10+ year member]

i had same issue.

plugged in my hard drive that i use with kenwood and half of the mp3s would not play

i tried to download the owners manual from alpine and it downloads a blank PDF file lol

it looks like itsa very limited support for mp3 format.

 

[zaph]

I downloaded the alpine manual and it mentions the formats that it supports but that still wasn't very helpful for me. I'm starting to wonder if it's not the ID3 (or any other metadata). Does anyone have any tips wrt that? I'm going to try to strip some of that out and see if it helps.

 

[Rubrignitz 10+ year member]

I noticed this myself w/ the ida-x001. Drove me a little crazy because of the fact that I couldn't go back past these files but they did play ok. Never dug into it, just thought I had some unsupported file type and wrote it off.

Purchased the new ida-x305 model today and will install it tonight. It will probably have the same errors with my mem sticks but I plan to find a solution to it.

 

[bigaudiofanati2 10+ year member]

Prolly copy right protected material, burn em to a cd and recopy to your drive.

Correct, the itunes downloaded stuff is protected unless you buy the plus version of the song. Burn it and re rip it to your computer. Or just use the ipod and make a playlist.

 

[talontedgirl]

I have no iTunes purchased music, however I have played music off three of my iPods (two are first generation iPod Touch models) and one is an older 30 GB iPod Video on my X305 without any problem. I do not have any aac encodes. All my music is VBR mostly using the V0 switch - there is some 192 and 320 CBR. both LAME and FhG and no problem with that. Check your iTunes library on your computer and make sure that the actual files are not read only. I do not think this is an Alpine issue.

Edited to add: if your files are in an aac container (i.e. m4p which is the drm protected format from iTunes) there is software that you can use to convert them to .m4a that will not damage the files. If you convert them from one lossy format to another you will end up with garbage. Since the first time they were compressed data was removed, if you convert to another lossy format, more data will be removed - you cannot put back what is missing. Suggest you go to hydrogen audio and read about transcodes.