Anyone Familiar With The PCMCIA Slot In The Mercedes Comand System?

[Fred]

I bought a 6 in 1 adapter to use in my C300. The adapter supports the SDHC cards and I was thinking about getting a 32gb card to use with the adapter.

The literature in the Mercedes owners manual seems a bit confusing to me, but I think the PCMCIA slot will only support MP3, WMA and ACC formats. I'm not sure that any one of these formats is actually "better" than the other, but the literature does indicate that files should be saved at the highest possible bit rate. I asked this question on another forum and would like to ask it here: Is there some point at which high bit rates tend to overcome the compression limitations of MP3, WMA, AAC, etc.?

If anyone on the forum has a Benz with this feature I would be interested to hear what your view of it is.

 

[amirm]

Yes. The preferred encoding format is VBR at max quality. VBR stands for variable bit rate meaning it will keep the quality constant and let the data rate fluctuate. This generates files that are about 25% of the original file size or half the size of lossless files. In the past, the non-PC players could not reliably play such files but these days they have much faster processors so it is not an issue.

If VBR mode is not supported, then select 320 kbps. This so called CBR mode (the default mode for lossy compression) keeps the bit rate constant at the expense of quality. At 320 kbps though, the degradation is very mild. If these stutter too then you can progressively lower the bit rate until they play. But hopefully VBR works.

As to codecs, I am partial to WMA since my group developed it . But AAC is also an excellent choice. At 320 kbps both of them should sound exceptionally good. I would avoid MP3 though as it is less efficient than both of these.

I don't have a Mercedes but my Land Rover plays VBR WMA and it sounds very nice.

 

[Fred]

Thanks Amir. The system doesn't support VBR, but I have been encoding files at 320kbps. I'm doing a few albums in each format just to see if I can tell any differences.