CD-Text

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Compact Disc Text

CD-Text is an extension of the Red Book Compact Disc specifications standard for audio CDs. It allows for storage of additional information (e.g. album name, song name, and artist) on a standards-compliant audio CD. The information is stored either in the lead-in area of the CD, where there is roughly five kilobytes of space available, or in the Subchannels R to W on the disc, which can store about 31 megabytes. These areas are not used by strict Red Book CDs. The text is stored in a format usable by the Interactive Text Transmission System (ITTS). ITTS is also used by Digital Audio Broadcasting or the MiniDisc. The specification was released in September 1996 and backed by Sony. Support for CD-Text is common, but not universal. Utilities exist to automatically rip CD-Text data, and insert it into CDDB or freedb.

[edit] Software

Windows Media Player 10 and 11 with the WMPCDText plug-in support reading CD-Text.
iTunes 7 supports burning with CD Text. It is by default an unchecked option in the burning preferences.
Toast on Mac OS X has support for CD-Text.
X-CD-Roast has had reading/editing/writing support since version 0.98alpha10.
The underlying command-line utilities cdrecord/cdda2wav have support in (at least) version 2.01, but it must be enabled. See the documentation.
K3b has support for reading and writing CD-Text
Realplayer 10 supports Reading and Writing of CD-Text
Winamp has had support for CD-Text since version 5.31.
Spider Player has support for reading CD-Text to fill in artist/title information (if present) for the user when playing and ripping CDs
Exact Audio Copy and CDex have support for reading CD-Text to fill in artist/title information (if present) for the user when ripping CDs.
Brasero has support for CD-Text from version 0.5.90
PreMaster CD and soundBlade on Mac OS X both have CD Text support.
Amadeus Pro on Mac OS X has CD Text support.
XMPlay, since version 3.3