We’re often asked, “when my customers put my CD in their player, will my album title and track names show up?”  The short answer is: “It depends what kind of player they’re using and on what steps you’ve taken before they put it in the player.”

If they’re putting your CD into an Internet-enabled device (such as their computer), the computer is accessing an online database with information that matches your CD.  Even though it seems incredibly much to the contrary, please believe us on the following counter-intuitive point: The information they see does NOT come from your CD -- it comes from a database file that is believed to match your CD.  (If there is an error in that database file, therefore, it can be corrected; it is not a hard-coded error on the disc.  And if nothing is coming up, that also can be easily corrected. Breathe deeply.)  There are a few major databases, and the instructions at the bottom of this page will tell you exactly how to make sure you’re represented on the biggest two databases in fewer than 15 minutes.

If they’re putting your CD into a standalone player, it’s another thing altogether.  CD-text didn’t catch on universally with standalone players, but if you wanted it to show up on the standalone players that do support CD-text it needed to be encoded with CD-text at the mastering stage.  Your CD would need to have been encoded with CD-text at the mastering stage (before you sent it to us) and the player would need to support CD-text (not all standalone players do). Not to panic: it’s not a default part of the original CD manufacturing standard and is not universally supported even by big record labels.

I haven’t manufactured my CD yet, can you guys make it show text on standalone players?
Even if your mastering engineer didn’t encode your master with CD-text, if your CD is not yet in production we can add it for you - speak with your Project Manager or Client Advisor for details and pricing.  Note again that CD-text has absolutely nothing to do with computers and that your customer’s player has to support CD-text for them to see it. (In other words, we're trying to refer you back up to paragraph 2, the one with all the gratuitous bolding...)

I want my album information to show up when people use internet-connected computers to play my music!
No problem.  There are two big databases that you need to be on, and you can do your part to be listed on these databases in less than 15 minutes.  The first database is the Gracenote CDDB (used by iTunes, Winamp, and dozens of other software players).  The second is the AllMusicGuide database (used by Windows Media Player).  Getting your album information onto these databases is easy and quick:

GRACENOTE CDDB REGISTRATION INSTRUCTIONS:

ALLMUSICGUIDE DATABASE REGISTRATION INSTRUCTIONS:

I want more information!
Check out these links:

CD Text:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Text
http://web.ncf.ca/aa571/cdtext.htm

Gracenote CDDB:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote
http://www.gracenote.com/

AllMusicGuide database:
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=32:amg/info_pages/a_product_submissions.html