CD Text and CDDB
Posted on | September 12, 2008 | 1 Comment
I recently finished a project for a client who requested CD Text encoding in the disc, which I supplied. When I sent him the final master, I received this note:
“Paul, I received the gold master and it sounds great. However, when I put it in my computer to import, none of the song titles or any information came up. The tracks are just listed as track 01… and so on. Is it supposed to be that way? I was expecting the song titles and my name. Am I confused?”
The simple answer is “yes.” The not-so-simple answer is “it depends.”
What I believe the client is referring to is CDDB, which is information culled from an online database. After you insert a disc into a computer’s drive, its media player connects to the CDDB online server and scans the database for a disc of the exact same stats as the disc that’s been inserted: same disc length, number of songs, and song lengths. Through a process of elimination, it can tell what disc has been inserted as virtually no two discs can duplicate all those parameters in the correct order. When it gets the correct match, it imports the disc info. This is not CD Text, though, because nothing has been encoded to the disc but music and track start/end markers. It just compares what you have to a database and makes a correct (or close) match. However, your disc needs to be on the company’s database, otherwise no information (or no correct information) will come up.
CD Text, on the other hand, is data encoded in the disc that certain media players (hardware and software) can read. However, not all player are CD Text-compatible/enabled. Ironically, neither iTunes nor Windows Media Player (up to v.10) are CD-Text compatible. I believe Nero is, though. So though not every player reads it, the data is encoded in the disc.
Confusing? Well, it’s really pretty simple but it’s kind of silly that neither is guaranteed to work.
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From Ohm to Om reflects the opinions of mastering engineer Paul Abbott, owner of San Diego's ZenMastering.
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November 28th, 2008 @ 7:15 pm
[...] post) that the client had confused CD Text with CDDB. Not that uncommon. So much so that I had an earlier blog posting explaining the two. Category: General [...]