Audio CD player that shows the CD TEXT?

[Asterra]

Having a surprisingly difficult time with this. I went through the trouble of manually generating a .CUE file loaded with title and performer text for each of the tracks. Trouble is I don't personally own a car stereo with a CD player (this is a gift), so unless there's an app that will play this CD and show me the text information, I don't have a way of testing its accuracy.

WMP pretends it can show the information but all the entries are empty, so I'm guessing what it is instead doing is attempting to find metadata online (and failing).

VLC and Winamp both refuse to show any text. MPC-HC doesn't even want to play the thing.

Edit: While I'm at it, it would also be nice to know what player can play an audio CD track by track without injecting a tiny wait between the tracks (I don't mean two seconds). Many of the songs on my CD are split up between several tracks, seamlessly. VLC and Winamp fail this to varying degrees.

[hech54]

Computer DVD burners rarely advertise that their products can actually READ CDtext. The only company I know that actually listed CD Text in in the features or specs is LG. As I recall even creating/burning CDText is optional(?).....not 100% sure on that.
I use LG burners exclusively(I have 3).
The only program I know for certain that creates/burns CDText was Prassi Ones.....I also own Prassi Ones.
I'm guessing ImgBurn can do it too but it's just so much easier with Prassi Ones.
Volkswagen car stereos of the past 10 years display CDText, at least the European ones anyway.

I believe Prassi Ones also has an option to add a pause between tracks, or an option to REMOVE the pause.....one of the two.

Oh...and you can CREATE CDText in Prassi from scratch.

[Asterra]

Computer DVD burners rarely advertise that their products can actually READ CDtext.

First I ever heard of this. At the end of the day, it's all data, right? Could I not just rip the audio CD as an ISO, mount it, and expect the CD-TEXT to at least be there? Or does it somehow hide from a direct reading of raw data?

I'm guessing ImgBurn can do it too but it's just so much easier with Prassi Ones.

Hadn't heard of Prassi Ones. ImgBurn does do it, yes. I wouldn't call it super easy (and anyway I basically just manually edited a .CUE file), but ImgBurn did discover the data in the file and use it appropriately.

I believe Prassi Ones also has an option to add a pause between tracks, or an option to REMOVE the pause.....one of the two

Yeah, that two-second pause isn't the kind of pause I mean. It's basically like the player (Winamp or VLC) was not designed to play tracks seamlessly even when that's exactly how they are on the CD. The duration is about 50ms in VLC and 150ms in Winamp.

Edit: I just had ImgBurn take a look at the physical CD I burned and it found all the CD text, meaning my burner (a LiteOn) is capable of both burning and reading the text. So it's the players that are failing, which leads me back to square one.

Any takers? ;p

[Asterra]

Found one. Foobar2000. Shows the CD text and plays the CD seamlessly. Let posterity be aware.

[hech54]

CDText is one of those age-old mysteries for those of us who want to utilize it.....or even HEARD OF it.

[Cornucopia]

Not a mystery to me. It's all set out in Philips' 90's update to the RedBook. Text is formatted in a particular way (similar to "tags") and placed in the subchannels (aka Subcode, R-W), usually in the lead-in, but sometimes also in the main data section.

Access to either the Lead-In or the Subcode (or both) can only be done in RAW96 mode (aka 2448byte sector size). Therefore, an ISO (which by nature only sees the cooked CD-ROM user data section (whether Mode1 or Mode2Form1 - both 2048 sector size), cannot ever convey the info (read or write) to incorporate CD+Text. CUE+BIN is able to cover any of the modes/sector-sizes, so it's the preferred format. And yes, ImgBurn can handle CUE+BIN in it's various options, including CD+Text and including Mixed-Mode as well as (now) Multi-Session. Probably can do CD+G and other more esoteric formats too.

Other apps should also support burning CD+text: CDRWin does/did, Alcohol 120% should, in fact any app that claims full support of CUE+BIN file format.

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Many burners+readers specify whether CD+text is supported. Most ALL Pioneer & Plextor did, as well as Yamaha. If you mean player by app or settop player, then no, it is often trial & error. I have an OLD CDtext reader app in my archives if you need it, but if Foobar2000 works for you I think that would be preferable.

Scott

[Asterra]

Thanks, folks. Yep, Foobar2000 (which I'd forgotten I'd installed, who knows when, or why) does the trick just fine. I guess I was just temporarily taken aback that none of my "old faithful" apps could handle a decades-old digital audio format without issues.