Reading CD-TEXT - why so hard?

[glashoppah]

My wife's brother has a Mac. He sometimes sends her audio CDs which are compilations of various tracks he likes, which he crafts on his Mac. These are in AIFF format.

These CDs, when placed in my wife's car CD player or in our home CD player, clearly contain CD-TEXTl, because the players display artist and album information as they play each track.

However, when I put this CD in my Mac I can't seem to be able to read this text with any program I have. I've tried many, including iTunes, SongGenie, MusicBrainz, Amadeus Pro among others (all of these are licensed, by the way) and I also can't read it with my PC using programs like EAC which explicitly supports CD-TEXT extraction. All the tracks simply show Track01, Track02, et cetera.

How can I find this CD-TEXT information, that's obviously on the CD somewhere, and read it?

Thank you for your assistance,

G.

 

[Leddy]

Hi glashoppah,

Try Doug's Applescripts for iTunes.

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=cdtexttocdinfo

Also, check out this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qflFzpeBDQY

It's very helpful.

Cheers.

 

[glashoppah]

Hi glashoppah,

Try Doug's Applescripts for iTunes.

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=cdtexttocdinfo

Also, check out this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qflFzpeBDQY

It's very helpful.

Cheers.

I was afraid to try Doug's script because of its age. However I ended up finding a UNIX command that let me read the CD-TEXT - and it was the only tool I found in days of searching, downloading and running various audio tools that would show the CD-TEXT.

I suspect Doug's script utilizes the UNIX command I found. Thanks for the info, I'll give that a try if I ever need this again.

G.

 

[Leddy]

I saw that too - thought I'd steer you towards the Applescript as many people are daunted by the command line.

Cheers.