WHEN I PUT A CD IN A COMPUTER WHY DO SOME CDS DISPLAY THE NAME OF THE ALBUM AND THE SONG TITLES AND OTHERS DON'T?
If you boot up iTunes and see a display of the artist, album name and song titles it's because someone has entered the information into the CDDB (Gracenote) database. Please see www.gracenote.com for more information. This can also be done through iTunes and other programs. The disc has to be inserted into the drive and your computer has to be connected to the internet in order to do this.
This should not be confused with a software function called CD Text. CD Text can be enabled in the master writing program by the mastering engineer. This doesn't take long to do and we do it as part of the mastering job.
CD text is read by some CD players and most new car stereos as well as large carousel CD players (holds 50 or 60 discs). In addition, DVD players that play CDs usually have a menu that reads the text and also Real Player and Winamp on the PC.
Window Media Player is a different story. Up until recently, one could enter the CD data into the WMP database through the Microsoft Website. Unfortunately they appear to have this closed off to the independent artists so we are not able to do this at the moment.
For a fee of $20., Silverbirch will provide album data to the Gracenote database for your new master so that an audio disc booted up in iTunes will display all the pertinent information. Contact us for more information.
And lastly, Be sure to register your CD information with the other two primary companies that manage metadata databases for the industry: All Music Guide and Muze. Both companies have different procedures for accepting metadata from directly from artists so contact them directly.