I have a car stereo with RDS. Depending on the station it will display artist and song info as well as anything else the station sees fit to broadcast.

Here is the question.

Why can't it display artist and song info when a CD is played instead of just sitting there saying track XX? Why not display the track number along with artist and song info and probably the record label as well?

Is this doable?

Would require either a two way operation to get data from a server, or the radio stations to send a stream of meta-data for the receiver to eventually latch on to and display, or a cache of meta-data to be used with the stream to compress it, or perhaps just to display those artists known at the time of manufacture.

Of course there is CD-TEXT too. Many receivers do that. Used to be not all that many discs were mastered that way. Perhaps that has changed now. I don't know.

Does it display Mp3 "tags" ok from Mp3 cds that you make yourself?

"Why can't it display artist and song info when a CD is played instead of just sitting there saying track XX?

Because the information you want is never on a CD. It's never displayed on a stand alone CD player either. The only reason you see it when you pop the CD into the computer is that it can retrieve it from Gracenote (formerly CDDB) which requires an internet connection.

"{ Why not display the track number along with artist and song info and probably the record label as well?"

"Is this doable?"

If they would change the Red book standard, the info could be written to the disc. Sans that, you'll have to wait for RoIP.

CD text has been around for about 10 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-Text

I have read that Sony has been using it on CD's produced since that time.

I have never seen one, perhaps because I purchase obscure titles, or the feature does not work on any of the cd players that I own ?

I've only got a couple of CD's that incorporate CD-TEXT metadata from the factory.

If you burn your own CD's, this feature is easily configured in most burning / mastering software.

There are computer programmes that will read the CD Text track off the disc.

.......the "Copy Tracks From CD" thing in WinLAME comes to mind right off hand.............

So if it's doable why don't record labels put plugs in their for themselves and the artist along with song title and other information? It can't cost antything or very little to do. If the reader or stereo can't do it then it could just default to the std track number.