Reading additional song information from CD text data

When playing original audio CDs, Media Player software manages to fetch artist, album and track information from an online database. However, this is not the case when it comes to CDs that you yourself have complied

For some self-made compilations, additional information such as track lists is saved in the data field of the audio CD as CD text. But unlike music players such as Winamp, Windows Media Player cannot read them. A free plug-in helps retrofit the necessary functions in Windows Media Player version 10 onwards. You can download WMPCDText from bmproductions.fixnum.org/morepages/wmpcdtext.

Run Windows Media Player after installing the plug-in. Confirm the displayed settings in the dialog that appears. After inserting an unknown CD, you can try to read the data from the CD text. For this, activate the ‘Now Playing’ option and then right click on the title. The context command ‘Read CD text’ then directly accesses the CD and then reads the available CD text. This method requires the CD drive and the burner to support the CD text and the suitable data to be available on the CD.

Note: Access to the CD drive is a hardware-related system process. Therefore, it works only if you use a user account with administrator rights. CD text is an extension of the audio CD standard for saving information such as track lists in a data field on the audio CD. They should not be mixed up with the title information that some media players can fetch from the Internet.