Does iTunes 7 "Include CD Text" Burn Feature Work?
The CD player in my car will display the disc title and song name if it is encoded with CD Text information. It works well with Toast. I noticed that iTunes 7 has a Burn preference "Include CD Text" checkbox, but when I select it and burn a CD the info does not appear in the car.
I wonder if the feature is dependent on the type of burner you have. I'm using an external LaCie drive, which does do CD Text with Toast, but maybe iTunes 7 can't make it work. That could also explain why some people see the feature disabled--maybe iTunes 7 knows it can't do CD Text on some drives.
I just made a disc with my daughter's G5 iMac with the built-in burner and the CD Text did not appear on my car's player with that disc either. My conclusion is that the CD Text feature does not work properly. It may work within iTunes but it's not industry standard.
What kind of car do you have? I had this issue with my Prius and its built-in CD player.
A long time ago, I read that there are actually two "standards" for CD-Text. One stores the text information in a data field at one end of the CD; the other embeds it in a subchannel of the audio. I wonder if iTunes is using one of these methods and the car is expecting the other.
sigh
It could be something like that. My car is a 2005 Prius with the standard audio system. I mentioned the problem to a friend who has a 2006 Prius with the 6 disc changer. He burnt a CD Text disc with iTunes 7 and says that the text appeared for him. The definitive test will be when I try the disc he made in my car.
Nevertheless, discs with CD Text information burnt with Toast seem to work everywhere. I think that iTunes 7 should have done better with its CD Text implementation. From my reading of the specs it sounds like there are two different places to store the CD Text info, so it can (and should) be written to both.
I burnt a CD yesterday with iTunes 7 and the CD Text feature turned on. I tried the CD in my car, a 2005 Nissan Aramda, but nothing displayed. I know the CD player supports CD text so I wondered if iTunes didn't burn the CD correctly. I started trying the CD in all my CD and DVD players. On my Sony DVD player, the disc did display the disc title but not the track titles. However, I'm not sure that it would since it's a DVD player. That at least told me that iTunes wrote something on the disc. Then I read that if you insert the CD you burned back into your Mac and launch Toast, select Disc Information under the Recorder menu, you can see a listing of all the burned tracks and the CD text that was written on the disc. Sure enough, iTunes 7 had burned the disc title, track name and artist for each of the tracks.
Given that iTunes appears to burn CD Text correctly, the mystery is why my car doesn't recognise it. I'm also wondering about the two standards for CD text and if maybe the one iTunes supports isn't the same as the one my car supports. I'm hoping that maybe someone else can shed some light on that.
Just as a quick update to my post, I tried the disc I burned in iTunes 7 in the DVD player of my Nissan and everything showed up great...disc title, track title and artist. When I put the same disc in the CD player, it showed no information. Same thing when I put it in my other car with a Pioneer unit, it did not read the text. Both car CD players are supposed to be capable of reading CD Text.
So it seems clear to me that iTunes is writing the CD Text information but that somehow, certain players aren't reading it.
I've just found out that iTunes can only find information for CD track names if the burned disk is exactly the same as a commercial disk. The songs have to be in the same order. Therefore you have to enter names in manually for burned playlists and purchased songs.
Kinda annoying but there you have it.
I tested this new iTunes 7 feature yesterday and it works fine on my Pioneer CD Radio. iTunes fills out the Artist Name, Track Name and the Disc Name by using the name of the playlist.
I've burned CD's using Toast with the burner I have now in the past with the CD-TEXT option on and they work great. Today I burned a CD with the option on in iTunes and my car ('06 Lexus GS300) doesn't display the text where the ones from Toast do. Apple is, apparently, working feverishly on fixes for most of the problems people had. Hopefully we'll get more consistency with the feature.
Volvo XC90 ... CD Text works like a charm! Just don't forget to enable the function in the menu of the audio system in the car. Again... this is in a Volvo XC90 with the enhanced audio system.
Since I haven't had luck getting CD Text to work in my car using iTunes, I decided to burn the exact same playlist using Toast instead. Sure enough, the CD Text now displays in my car. Since we know iTunes is writing CD Text information, it's pretty clear that CD players read this information differently. From what I've read, it sounds like there are two standards. One writes all the information on the edge of the disc while the other embeds it with each track. I'm guessing that Apple chose to support one, not both standards, and that's the reason it's working on some players and not others. However, it could also be true that iTunes is supposed to support both standards and in that case, there's a bug in this version of iTunes. Without knowing more details about how CD Text was implemented in iTunes, it seems like the best course of action is to log feedback and request that CD Text support be fixed/enhanced to support both standards.
I am happy to report that I burned a CD with iTunes 7.0.2 and the CD Text information now appears on the display in my car. So whatever problem version 7.0 had seems to have been fixed.
