When you play a commercial music disc in your computer using a program such as Windows Media Player, the name of the disc, the performer, and the names of all the songs are usually displayed. In most cases, this text is not contained on the disc itself. Your music player downloaded it for you from a large online music database.

What if you don’t have an Internet connection? What if your disc cannot be found in the database or your media player does not recognize the songs on your disc? Instead of song titles, you will see “Track 1,” “Track 2,” and so on. Instead of the performer’s name, “Unknown Artist” or “Audio CD” will appear in its place.

You can store song information directly on the discs you burn so it is always displayed correctly. This text is stored in a special location and is called CD Text. Some disc drives and CD players display CD Text about each song as it is played.

A disc can contain 5,000 characters of Western language CD Text or 2,500 double-byte characters.

Use this box to add album and track information and to set pre-gaps.