I have a few classical CD, when i burn them in EAC, should the "Drive is able to Write CD-text" ticked?

and is CD-text commonly recorded in CD and sopported by most players??

I don't see CD-Text discs often, although CD-Text is useful. My six years old Sony stereo supports CD-Text, so does my iRiver IMP-550 MP3 player and the CD player in my Toyota Corolla.

I only activate the option if CD-Text was present on the original CD - in which case, I would have left it unaltered within the cuesheet and "remembered" that the original had CD-Text. In all other cases, I add the metadata myself but don't burn it on making a copy.

I don't see any reason why not to burn a CD-Text information on newly burned audio CD.
You never know when it would be useful eg. no internet connection to read CDDB information for you.

I use CD Text whenever I burn a CD, even if it's of a CD I already own. I'll input my own CD Text if the original CD didn't have it. I have CD and DVD players and portables that support CD Text and to me seeing the name of the song as the song plays does increase my enjoyment of the experience quite a bit and usability of the CD as well (if I am searching for a song I want to listen to on the CD, I can just look for it by name). Also, if I later rip the CD to the computer CD Text can help some of the more intelligent programs with song tagging of all of the ID tag fields, which can save tons of time. When I rip LPs to the computer, I first make a lossless CD of the LP recording with CD text, and then I rip it to MP3, and usually whatever program I am using at the time can fully tag based on the CD Text information.

In short -- for me -- CD Text -- two thumbs up!!!

I keep the CD-TEXT option on all the time. I've noticed though, it doesn't allow the cd to played in all players. It's usually the less expensive type, like portable cd players. There's one head unit for a car I've found which has a hard time with CD-TEXT enabled disks.

That is bullshit since CD-Text is stored in the subchannel data which otherwise is full of nulls.

That begs the question: why don't all cd's have CD-TEXT info on them these days?

Apparantly making a CD that fails to play on some players isn't even considered a drawback as they do that for certain copy-protection systems.

I just got done telling someone that I can't untick "Drive is able to write CD-Text" or my drive will give me a coaster.

BTW, CD-Text is usually stored in the TOC, not the subchannel data.

I suppose it is a patent/license issue. CD-Text is from Philips IIRC and I reckon labels have to pay a license fee. Since customers won't base their purchase decision of a particular CD on the presence of CD-Text but rather on the music there is little incentive for a label to pay the fees for CD-Text.

It is stored in the R-W subchannel data of either the lead-in (common) or "parallel to the music" (less common). Basically, it is always stored in the subchannel data.

Gotcha!

According to various sources, CD text can be written either in the lead-in area, where the TOC goes, or it can be written into R-W subchannels, or sometimes the R & P subchannels. Some claims are that the lead-in area position is the most common implementation.

My mistake was not realizing that R-W subchannels also exist in the lead-in area.
Do you have a link showing that it will also use the P subchannel? This doesn't seem right.
I took a few courses from Prof. Kuhn but I didn't take the one on CD players. She was great!

Ignoring this technical-talk if you don't mind, I just have to say the following:

1. Apparantly there indeed are (at least) 2 methods of CD-Text. Until recently, for instance, Sony used the one that apparantly does not read text data on most CD-Text-Enabled CD players ( but would easily be read by some CD-Text reading apps (like Roxio's WinOnCD, Steinberg Wavelab and some others). This is probably due to this instability mentioned before.

2. All of Polydor/Polygram's European label CDs (non-classical, at least), as well as most WEA/MCA/Warner titles have been using CD-Text since mid-90s at most.

3. Personally, I always burn CDs with CD-Text. This was also one of the considerations for selecting a CD-burner in the first place. Most car stereos and quite a few CD players (though hardly any DVD players I've come accross) have this feature enabled. It's at least as useful as radio RDS / text data feeds.

4. Unfortunately, most music players do not support CD-Text. I've been aching to find one that's reasonable (QCD, WinAmp, Foobar, Windows Media Player, iTunes and others just don't do it) and at last got to the only player that's actually uising it intelligently - VU-Player. I don't know of any plugins to any other player software that read CD-Text data.

5. This is a very important feature for CD-ripping to audio files, as CDDB/FreeDB/MusicBrainz doesn't always provide the correct titles and full information. CD-Text is an absolute truth in terms of tagging music files, and requires no additional measures (such as internet connection or the need to choose between several similar titles).

6. Unlike CD-Extra and other more-or-less useless technologies (well, the technologies are nice, but most titles were rather silly and wasteful in their data part), CD-Text is non-obtrusive on the CD's audio data. It does not affect sound quality or take up space (this is also why it's limited to 2500 characters, or even less).

And one last thing - as burnt CDs read only on most CD players anyway (older players don't seem to like them too much), and as all newer players easily play burnt CDs with CD-Text info embedded in them (using or ignoring that data) - I see no practical reason not to use this feature.

What's more, I'd do anything to encourage people to implement CD-Text reading capabilities to all music players. I'm sure it's not al that complicated.

I never appreciated CD Text (or even thought about why I ticked the option box) until I bought a CD/SACD changer. Now, I'm happy that I burned all of my backup copies with CD text

Hmm. Then it must be some odd coincidence everytime I use EAC and Nero's CD-TEXT, although everything plays fine when the CD-TEXT in not in use.

Once upon a time I wanted to know something or other about CD text and did a Google search. One or more of the places I found mentioned that R & P subchannels thing, but my notes do not contain source information. I do remember reading on the Furio site and in Wikipedia, along with others, but I don't know what came from where.

I've only got one CD with CD-TEXT out of 2000+ commercial CDs I've bought in the last 16 or so years so it isn't that common-place. However, I always burn my own audio CDs with it enabled, not for some hardware that may recognise it but instead for ripping applications.

This article for example contains invalid information: http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq03.html#S3-7

It cannot be the P subchannel because that contains information about pauses.

Are there multiple versions of CD-TEXT? I have an old Kenwood car CD player that would never display any text despite claiming to support it. I tried a few different burning methods too.

My new Clarion supports text on every disc I've thrown at it (including the ones that I thought I had mis-burned).

"I don't see any reason why not to burn a CD-Text information on newly burned audio CD."

Truth to the original? I don't know. That's just my "policy".

Actually it is always stored in the lead-in and sometimes in the program area, and always
in R-W subchannels as you said.

Oh, I see. Thanks for the clarification.