HI, i am looking at getting an ALPINE CDE-9852 head unit which is mp3 compatible for my TL. being mp3 compatible does that mean it will tell you on the screen what songs are on the cd or do you have to keep a list somewhere? sorry for the dumb question but being a 44 year old the last 4 speaker car stereo i bought was a sound 4 piece of crap back in 1980!!!

Depends on whether it can read ID3 tags from the MP3's or not, some CD players can't do that despite having an MP3 decoder as a feature, so just make sure you check into that first.

Most of the mp3 HU's i've had/seen will tell you what song is playing, whether it picks up the tags or goes by the filename. But from what i've seen none of them will display a list of all your mp3s, unless you get one that has an inbuilt LCD screen.

i'm pretty sure with that model it will scroll the file name across the screen. thats what my bro's 9853 does.. but he's 2 slack to tag them properly 2
i've got a 9855 and it has a 2 line display that shows artist/album and song.
easiest way to see is to burn a cd of mp3s, make some of the id3v1 tagged, some v2 tagged and some no tags and head down to the dealer and make sure for urself... then u can see exactly what its gonna do and deside if its what u want.

yeah the alpine decks will only show you what song is currently playing
well the name of the file which will be the same as on the computer