How to get your CDs text info to show up on computers

Posted by Promodiscs

This is an area that often causes confusion,

There is a way to physically embed text information on to audio CDs, which is known as CD Text. The only problem with this is that most CD players and computers can’t read it??

In order for your computer (Mac or PC) to display the artist, song title and album name you’ll need to submit this information to three databases.

  1. CDDB – itunes
  2. AMG – windows media player
  3. freedb –  (discontinued in 2020)

There are other smaller databases but they are not really worth worrying about.

Once the information has been submitted to the databases and you place your CD into a computer, the fingerprint of your CD i.e number of tracks, track lengths track pauses etc is cross referenced with the appropriate databases and then the artist, song name, album, genre year etc will all be visible on itunes, media player etc.

Sometimes another CD containing an identical fingerprint to your CD will already exist on the database and you will be asked to select your CD from a list.
This is becoming more common as the database size increases and happens more frequently when a CD is submitted with fewer tracks, as the probability for an identical fingerprint is greater.

You can submit your CD to the itunes database easily by yourself in just a few minutes using the latest version of  itunes

1 . Load up itunes with your CD in the drive
2 . Select all the tracks of the CD
3. Right click and select get info (it might ask if you want to edit multiple items, click yes)
4. Edit all the information that applies to the whole album i.e artist, genre, album name etc with only the first letter of each word in capitals – Like This
5. Highlight an individual track then click the file tab and then click get info
6. Click the info tab and edit the song titles
7. Once you’ve finished writing the info for all tracks click “OK”
8. Highlight all of the tracks again
9. Click on the “Options” symbol on the upper right corner of the tracklist window
10. Select “Submit CD Track Names”
11. Allow the progress bar to complete

Your CD has now been submitted to Gracenote

Submitting to AMG lasso is more complex and there are a few criteria you need to meet before the CD will be accepted. Information on how to submit to AMG lasso is here
http://www.allmusic.com/product-submissions

To submit your audio CD to the FreeDB database you will need to install a program on your computer that supports FreeDB submissions. MAGIX Music Manager, Feurio!, CDex or Audiograbber are all popular programs for this.

Update
Magix, the owner of freedb.org has decided to take the cddb service on freedb down (in 2020)