#1 Burning Software

Hello there,

It appears that the album title is truncated at 30 (or maybe 31) characters in the CD-Text written to audio CDs. Other fields may be truncated too, I haven't looked into this in detail.

Can you please tell me the maximum length of these fields? I need to be able to inform my customers. Thanks.

Incidentally, I don't think it helps anyone to limit the number of forum searches we can make. Maybe I could have answered this question for myself if I had been able to search for CD Text, CD-Text, CDText etc. Just a thought.

Many thanks,

#define STARBURN_CDTEXT_MAX_TEXT_SIZE 32

This is the only one...

OK, thanks, but .... why? Many album / track titles are longer than this.

Question: How large is CD-Text information allowed to be? Is there an upper limit for the length of a track title?

Answer: Usually you don't have to worry about this at all - there is enough memory available for CD-Text information.
Basically, the following applies: The length of the CD-Text information per track is not limited - if the information entered is longer than the display on the CD-Player, then the text is shown as a running display.
The overall length of all CD-Text information however is limited; but the limit is so high that it normally doesn't have any effect. With 30 tracks, for example, the average length of the information per track can almost be 100 characters - so this should really not cause any problems!

If you want to know the details:
A CD-Text "Block" may be made up of a maximum of 256 so-called "Packs".
4 packs are needed for internal purposes.
The other 252 packs can be used for CD-Text information.
Each pack contains 12 characters.
Thus a total of 3024 characters of CD-Text can be saved.
One character is needed as a separation character per track, thus with the maximum number of 99 tracks (+ 1 pseudo-track for the CD title), 2924 characters remain. If artist and title are entered for every track, 2 * 100 characters have to be subtracted, as artist and title are saved separately (so 2 separation characters per track are required), i.e. 2824 characters still remain - there are still 28 characters per track (for artist and title, i.e. e.g. 19 characters each for artist and title or any other distribution)!

With a "realistic" number of e.g. 30 tracks there are even 98.8 characters per track - more than enough - and because only the overall length counts, any individual track may be considerably longer if another is correspondingly shorter.

Hi Anton,

Thanks for the information. That's useful to know. I would appreciate it if the 31 character restriction could be lifted though. It seems a bit arbitrary to me. Most CDs are no more than 20 tracks so longer names would fit.

Regards,

Not now... We've had so many untraditional sex with the compatibility issues with CD-Text. So we're just not ready for another round.

OK, I can live with that, I know how it goes, although I have no idea what you mean by 'untraditional sex'

In our case it was getting negative feedback from users, modifying the code, sending back to user, checking and so on. Multiply on number of users and so you'll get the feeling you was raped for $100