Windows Media Player CD Text Support

Steve queries, "When I burn a CD in Windows Media Player, the CD doesn't display the track information in my home theater or in my car. Both players support CD Text, but all I see is track numbers. What am I doing wrong?"

Text data for music files is something I tend to take for granted with the thousands of songs ripped from CD or downloaded from my Napster subscription. It's definitely nice to have that information available when listening to CDs too. Newer car stereos and home theater gear support CD Text, which is an extension of the Red Book CD Digital Audio standard. Unfortunately, not all CD burning products are created equal.

Windows Media Player currently does not support CD Text burning as part of its package. For the record, neither does iTunes. Plenty of other CD burning applications do support CD Text as part of the burn process. The best known of these apps are Roxio Easy Media Creator and Nero. On the flip side, if the CD player supports WMA or MP3 playback, you could use Windows Media Player to burn your disks with more songs per disk and all the track information your CD player can handle.