We tried every hack imaginable - from installing Chinese language packs to pasting and re-pasting to and from Unicode-compliant programs. All to no avail.
When I was doing the mastering for Ember Swift’s first Lentic CD, we were trying desperately to encode Chinese song titles into the CD-TEXT fields. We tried CD Architect, EAC, Nero, Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, Roxio etc etc - the list went on and on. nothing was working. So, I wanted to share my findings with the class for the next poor sucka who tries to encode Asian characters using CD-TEXT.
In short, you can’t.
We tried every hack imaginable - from installing Chinese language packs to pasting and re-pasting to and from Unicode-compliant programs. All to no avail. The surprising thing is that there is little to no information easily available on the Net about the actual tech specs and character encoding used in CD-TEXT.
XOwav.com has a great post that covers meta data and CD-TEXT (as it applies to their mastering program, but it’s still relevant). Of CD-TEXT and character encoding specifically, they said:
Is CD-TEXT crap?
In a language other than English, definitely
“CD Text data may be embedded on the CD’s R and W subcodes, so, like UPC and ISRC data, CD Text does not affect the audio playback of your CD. Some CD players can read CD Text data and use it to display song information such as songwriter and track name. Information is stored in up to 8 blocks, each of which may be associated with a wide range of languages, including”None“, which indicates that the given block is not associated with any particular Language. Unfortunately, the CD Text standard supports only two-character encodings (ASCII and ISO Latin Modified 1), which in practice means that it cannot be used for non-Latin languages, such as Japanese.”
Here are email excerpts between myself and Ember’s team, trying to solve the problem on two separate occasions:
From: FibiiMedia [Tim in Studio] Sent: Monday, March 16, 2009 2:48 AM To: ’Ember Swift’ Subject: CD-Text Snafu - resolution and recommendation
Hi Ember,
Ok, I’ve been wrangggggling with f*&$^$ CD-Text all evening, trying to get the Chinese characters to work properly – they don’t, and at best are unreliable (showing up as ??? or boxes)
Here’s what I’ve learned:
CD-text is much less in use now, since the integration of the CDDB (Gracenote) and FreeDB via iTunes and most MP3 players. Ie, the MP3 meta tag system has taken over
CD-Text is now used on some car stereos and mini systems with text display
iTunes, Winamp and WinMedia player do not even *look at* CD-text info!
So, therefore, I strongly recommend *not* using the Chinese characters in the CD-TEXT fields on the Audio CD.
Domo arigato, in ASCII only please
*HOWEVER*
That being said, we will use the Chinese characters in the Meta Tags for the MP3s *and* on the CDDB (online CD Database called GraceNote).
So, what happens when you put the CD in is this:
1) *if* the player has CD-text functionality, it will display it – with fucked up Chinese characters (Artist: Lentic :: Ember Swift :: ???) – this is why I recommend English-only
2) *but* most players will not have CD-TEXT so it’s not an issue (ex: a regular old CD/DVD player in your living room)
3) *then* if you’re connected to the internet, and on a computer cd-player (to rip or play the cd), as per usual the CD player will query the online database and ... Voila! Instant English *and* Chinese characters. I did a test, and that works.
From: ryan morey Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 9:52 PM To: Fibii Media [Studio] Cc: Ember Swift; Harris Newman; David Sturton Subject: wrapping things up
Tim, we have burned cds with cd architect 5.2 as well as Nero. both will accept the unicode characters but as far as we can tell, fails to encode them onto the cd. attached is the cdp file we used. we tried burning it with three different drives and in all cases, it claims to work, but when we try to read the unicode cd-text back in via cd-architect, plextools, EAC, and windows media player (we found a 3rd party plugin that allows it to read cd-text, this is not a default option), in all cases it does not display the chinese. there is no way we can tell here if this is because the cd didn`t encode properly, or if the software just isn`t reading the chinese back correctly. we`ve also spoken to a few other mastering houses, and have yet to find anyone who knows how to do this — the general consensus is that is should not work, that unicode is fine for metatags but won`t encode in cd-text properly...
So what did we learn from all this, class?
do your CD-TEXT in English (ASCII encoding)
do your Meta tags for Gracenote/CDDB in whatever language you want (Unicode encoding)
Special thanks to Ryan at Ryebread Mastering for his commiseration in this matter
References
XOwave.com post
Wikipedia CD-TEXT entry
A post with similar findings
Typical - and very confused post - on AsianFanatics.com
Unofficial CD-TEXT FAQ
