how does my cd player work!?

[daveclayton]

having done my dash gloss black recently, i dug out some old cds and was playing them in the car. usually it comes up with just track one, two, three etc. but one one really old copied one, the name of the band and song scrolled across the screen. i wanna now know how to make all of my cd's do this!!

 

[GainfulShrimp]

Sounds like it's using 'cdtext'. Get yourself a copy of Nero BurningROM or similar to burn CDs including cdtext, then they should show up... Nero can look up CDs in CDDB or similar to find titles and track listings from the net, so you don't need to enter them manually. Nifty feature.

Can't wait to get my FR next week... the wait is killing me!

 

[daveclayton]

but how come non copied cds dont show up wth the song name?

 

[GainfulShrimp]

This is just luck/coincidence. Not many CDs have cdtext - copied or non-copied. IIRC it was a Sony initiative and not many CD producers actually bothered because of the limited range of players that could actually display it. Because there aren't many discs containing cdtext, there's no incentive for the manufacturers of players to support it... catch22. Some commercial discs definitely contain cdtext, but it's a very small proportion of CDs sold, I would guess - probably mostly released by labels which Sony owns/licenses.

I suppose if you use Nero or some other CD burning software that supports cdtext, your copies are more likely to include the cdtext because Nero can do this for you using CDDB information even if the original AudioCD didn't contain the cdtext data.

What I'm interested to know, is whether id3 tags are displayed on the head unit (or, even better, the bluetooth-style dash display) when playing mp3 CDs. That would be *really* nifty!

 

[daveclayton]

cheers, very informative post there. *thumbs up*

 

[phil3012]

I have a couple of old CD's with CD text plus a fairly recent Razorlight CD does as well.

Some of the MP3 info is displayed on the headunit but only from MP3 CD's not the via the iPod or USB connector though.

 

[Glovepup]

Yeah it is a sony thing and as already said music that comes from their labels will support it. I hate the fact that it never really caught on.

 

[nc30rider]

If you burn them as audio CD's then no text.
Burn them as Data CD's then you get more tracks on the disc and the added bonus of text on the screen.
Took me a while work this one out

 

[GainfulShrimp]

If you burn them as audio CD's then no text.

Not necessarily true, but you need to use burning software which supports cd-text. Nero BurningROM supports it, as do several other products. I believe iTunes does, but you need to set the option somewhere as it's disabled by default.
See this for more info.

Burn them as Data CD's then you get more tracks on the disc and the added bonus of text on the screen.
Took me a while work this one out

That's an mp3 CD, though. The OP was talking about AudioCDs (i.e. red book format).

 

[markmeus]

I use iTunes to burn my CD's and it gives you the option of adding CD Text on Audio CDs.

 

[Bedlam]

Not necessarily true, but you need to use burning software which supports cd-text. Nero BurningROM supports it, as do several other products. I believe iTunes does, but you need to set the option somewhere as it's disabled by default.
See this for more info.

This is weird as I have been experimenting just this week by putting together MP3 CD's for my car, I used iTunes but the ID Tags truncated, I think it may be because too much info was in iTunes, or possibly because my file names are too long. The Seat Owner Manual gives (limited) information on this.
I have not figured out yet (using iTunes) how to put tracks into different folders on the disk and ended up with 157 tracks in the root folder!!
iTunes also completes the disk (can't remember the correct IT term) so it cannot be written to again.

Going to dig out a Re-Writeable disk and play with that as it is wasting my supply of Read/Write disks experimenting, probably use Nero for that and see how I get on.

 

[nc30rider]

The only way i can get the title of the albums and tracks to work is to burn Data CD's, works every time with every track
If I burn Audio ones, even with the text turned on, I do not get any text
I use Windows Media Player

 

[markmeus]

I don't think iTunes can burn a Folder structure on a disc. I tried to do it for my Dad, as his Astra has an mp3 cd headunit, but it just put them all in the root. I did read that it was possible, but as far as I'm concerned it's not.

So now I just use Nero, it works pretty well.

 

[GainfulShrimp]

Nero is good - best burning software, in fact (IMHO!). I don't think Windows Media Player supports cd-text very well, if at all. The Wikipedia article I posted a link to above mentions that you need an extra plugin for WMP to support cd-text... but that plugin just enables reading of cd-text, not reading it.
In fact, a quick Google confirms that WMP can't burn discs with cd-text, which explains nc30rider's problem:

How do I burn CD TEXT?

Windows Media Player doesn't provide this capability. Although some newer CD and DVD drives support it, CD TEXT is not part of the current CD audio standard, which the Player uses to burn Audio CDs. For more information, in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, see article 297756, "Metadata Is Not Copied When You Make an Audio CD-ROM."

By the way, closing your discs is almost always the best thing to do for compatibilty with non-PC devices and players, like car CD players. Discs are pretty darn cheap now on t'internet so I always close my discs and don't bother with multisession. Some players don't like multisession discs even if they're closed, sadly.

 

[nc30rider]

Nero is good - best burning software, in fact (IMHO!). I don't think Windows Media Player supports cd-text very well, if at all. The Wikipedia article I posted a link to above mentions that you need an extra plugin for WMP to support cd-text... but that plugin just enables reading of cd-text, not reading it.
In fact, a quick Google confirms that WMP can't burn discs with cd-text, which explains nc30rider's problem:


By the way, closing your discs is almost always the best thing to do for compatibilty with non-PC devices and players, like car CD players. Discs are pretty darn cheap now on t'internet so I always close my discs and don't bother with multisession. Some players don't like multisession discs even if they're closed, sadly.

That would explain it.....Cheers!!