I have a collection of recordings I made, all organized in itunes. Titles track names, albums, artist etc, is not showing up on my burned disc. Please tell me how I can fix this to see all the text on my burned CD's.
iMac (27-inch Late 2009)
Standard audio CDs do not have that information. If you burned a CD and iTunes displays the track information it is because it has stored it in a local information database on that computer. Use another computer or third party player and you won't see it.
You don't provide full information such as where you are playing this CD or which format. There may be workarounds depending upon this information.
Thanks for your reply 🙂 I understand the process for commercial Cd's. But these are my personal recordings, and all the track names, titles, artists and album info was manually entered. All the info/data was entered using tunes 12, latest OS system. When it says the disc is done burning, the titles etc all show on the computer screen, but when the disc is checked by re-entering it to my imac or to my laptop,... there is no info, not even names or titles.
I have over 40 playlist of different artists..which contain over 1200 songs. These are intended to be played on all types of devices from cars to boom boxes to computers. Thanks for your help!
That is the way it works for all audio format CDs. The convention was established 30+ year go and has not changed.
If the information is not showing when you insert the CD back into the same computer then you are either not using audio CD format and are simply burning something like WAV files in data format, or there is a serious bug in the iTunes software or elsewhere in your computer that nobody else in the world has discovered because I have not seen any recent similar posts.
If you insert the disc into a different computer than as I said the information is not on the disc and therefore the other computer only sees an audio CD with a bunch of no-name tracks.
Ok, so that's a bummer that track names, titles and artists names cannot accompany the CD's... So if it's the norm of 30 years, I guess there is nothing I can do. It still seems odd to burn disks with no metadata at all. Is there any other aftermarket software? I don't see how these Cd's can be sold and marketed if titles and artists and track names aren't there...aside from the little paper inside the Cd cover... Thanks again for your help in my understanding this stuff. ps. yes, the disc worked in the same laptop in which it was created, and only after doing homeshare, could I see the data on my Imac...
Hi Wholey,
When you burn a CD from iTunes you can choose from three options: Audio CD, MP3 CD, or Data CD. Only the third option, Data CD, will preserve all the information about your music, but you're likely to have problems playing that in devices other than a computer. The second option, MP3 CD, will be playable on a wider range of devices, and should (I believe) preserve the info from tags like Artist, Album, etc -- though you may need to convert the tracks to MP3 in iTunes if they're in a format like m4a.
If you burn a regular audio CD, generally speaking, you're burning only the music itself, not the associated tags from iTunes. But there is a checkbox for "Use CD Text" in Burn Settings (the pop-up window that appears when you start the burning process) that, according to Apple, "disc players in some vehicles can display." So you might try this and see what happens.
There's a bit more detail here: iTunes 12 for Mac: Create your own CDs and DVDs
I hope this helps!
Thanks Richard,
I have been burning Audio Cd's with the text box checked, and that's where the confusion started:: why no text when text box was checked.. I suppose for archival purposes I should use a data CD to back up each "playlist/artist" and then investigate the mp3 option.
We have been recording and saving the files in the WAV format. I fear if we convert the WAV into mp3 the quality will be degraded in the primary archive of the WAV files. ??
Wholey,
Yes and no. If you make MP3 copies of your original WAV files in iTunes, the original tracks will not be affected and will remain in your iTunes library. (You can make it easier to tell which is which by using the Songs view and adding a column for Kind, which will tell you the media type of a given track. Then, if you wish, you can make smart playlists to sort music by Kind.)
An MP3 CD will, as you say, have lower audio quality. You can minimize this by setting your import settings in iTunes > Preferences to 320 kbps -- but otherwise there's no getting around this issue. But again, your original WAV files will be intact.
Things to note:
1) While iTunes can create CD text on audio format CDs it will not itself use it to identify tracks. You have to use a script such as the one on the Dougscripts web site for labeling using CD text in iTunes. Some players, as earlier noted, will use the information but it is not a widely accepted standard.
2) WAV is a problem format. WAV files will not store track information internally. Nothing will appear in iTunes except the file name as the track name. The best you can do is make sure the file name contains all the information you desire and then later parse it out to the individual label fields. AIFF is a similar format but will store information, and ALAC files will store the information and be about 50% the size of AIFF or WAV.
help! no track artist text on CD's
