By CD text can you mean......liner notes!? Musician credits? Composers? How can that be? That would be too wonderful!

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Not liner notes, no. This

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No, it's not quite the free-for-all feature that you may be envisioning.

It's a way to embed some metadata into an audio cd, so that compatible CD players (esp. in car stereos...) can display the song data while that song is playing. In my experience, it's usually just the artist and title that get displayed.

As you can probably imagine, CD-text is particularly handy for mix CD's full of obscure songs. :-)

for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Text
http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/cdtext.htm

This is another addition that brings iTunes/OSX a little closer to matching the Toast feature list. :-)

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For some reason this option is dimmed out on my system and can't be selected. The "Use Sound Check" option is available though. I have an old 1 GHz PBG4 running 10.4.7 and iTunes 7 with a Matshita CD-RW that came standard.

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About time.

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I burned a CD the other day using iTunes 7 with CD Text enabled. I was able to verify that the CD Text was included on the disc using Toast which shows that iTunes burned the disc title, track title and artist name for each track. The problem is that only certain players seem to regonize it, even though they are supposed to support CD Text. For example, in my 2005 Nissan, the CD Text does not display using the CD player (it shows NO DISC TITLE, NO TRACK TITLE, etc) but it does display properly if I play it on the DVD player in the car. The text also does not appear on my Pioneer car stereo which also is supposed to support CD Text but at least the disc title shows on my Sony home DVD player.

I know there are two ways of saving CD Text information on a disc and my guess is that iTunes supports one way, not both, however it's odd that only DVD players have been able to correctly read the CD Text, not any of my CD players that support it. Anyone have any ideas on what's going on?

Thanks,

Eric

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I think EricD is correct. There are two ways to encode CD Text information and iTunes only uses one. I can't say about DVD players, but a friend of mine and I have cars that can display CD Text with their stereos. The same disc burnt with iTunes 7 displays text on his but not on mine. Discs burnt with Toast work in both.

I think Apple only went half way with this feature. This, and the other complaints I've heard about iTunes 7, makes me concerned that they rushed it out before it was really ready.

As for the feature being disabled--I wonder if that means your burner doesn't support CD Text. I believe that not all of them do.

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I had the dimmed out text too. I fixed that by changing which CD burner handles the burning. I have an internal and an external. For some reason it was greyed out on my internal. I have had many problems with my internal burner in the past, ie– burns failing. If you don't have another CD burner then I guess there isn't a fix for it. Hope that helped.

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Yea it is dimmed out on my superdrive in my Dual 2.7 Ghz G5.

---
- Jonah Lee

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I burned a music CD with CD Text in iTunes 7 on my eMac using the updated OS 10.4. The disc title and song titles show up on my Sony CD player fine. But, on my work computer, an intel iMac using the same OS, it shows only as Audio Disc and Track 1, Track 2, etc., no titles at all. Using the internet to grab the titles won't work because these are private recordings. Can I fix this or do I have to import them as is and enter the titles individually all over again?

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I'm having the exact same problem; I've burned the same CD with iTunes 7 and Toast and the CD-Text doesn't show up in any computer other then the one that burned it.

Does anyone know of a program that burns CD text so that it actually shows up on another computer's iTunes?


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