CD Text display question (1 Viewer)

[TomK]

I want to get a mega changer like the SONY CDP-CX400 or something. It says that it has CD text which is good. Question is, how many CD's actually have the text information encoded? Most of them or few of them?

Tom

 

[CameronJ]

Tom,

Having just received and setup my CX400, I discovered that only 2 of my approx. 300 discs have CD text.

That being said, the majority of my CDs are more than 5 years old, so I'm sure that the percentage of new releases is much higher than that 0.67%.

I'd be interested to hear what percentage of new releases have it though.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

Exceptionally few CD's have CD-Text already on the disc. The best way to deal with it is to burn a copy of the CD with somesoftware that can link up to CDDB and bring down the song titles etc. EZCD and Nero can do this fairly easily. You now can place the CDR in the jukebox and keep the original as a backup etc.

 

[KeithH]

I agree with Andrew. I am in the process of copying CDs in my megachangers to CD-Rs using a computer CD burner. In cases where the CD is not logged into the CDDB, I can add text manually. I will leave the CD-Rs in the megachangers and will use the store-bought CDs in my better players.

 

[Jason_H]

It's another one of Sony's own standards, so it seems like only CDs produced from one of their own record labels have the CD-Text on them. But even then it is erratic...my Suede "Coming Up" on Columbia has it, my Miles Davis "Sketches of Spain" on Columbia Jazz does not. Both are obviously owned by Sony. I really wish this standard would have caught on, would have been cool. A cool feature for future products would be an ethernet port to hook the player onto your home network and just pull up the CDDB info for whatever CD you put in.

 

[TomK]

Thank guys! So I guess this "feature" cannot really be part of the decision. I do like the fact that you can do the CD-R option but the thought of having to 400 of them is mind-boggling, even if 100 of them actually had the text encoded. And I’ll second the idea of an Ethernet port, easy to do and should be very effective. Maybe in the future . . .

Tom

 

[Andrew Pratt]

Tom it is a daunting task to change them all to CDR's but IMO having CD-Text is very useful in finding songs etc. I virtually never have to pull out the old jewel cases anymore in fact in my new HT room they are going to be stored away in a box under the couch since I don't need to reference them anymore.

 

[PhilH]

I also have a Sony CDP-CX400 with about 280 cd's in it. Only one of them had cd text built into it, I think it was Shania Twain.
I believe you can only put in the cd title, not the song titles....right?
I also have sporatic problems with mine not being able to 'find' the cd when I power it on. It searches and searches and finally gives me a 'error loading disc'. It also sometimes skips to a different song or part of a song, and yes, I take very good care of my cd's, no scratches!! I took it to a local Sony repair shop and of course they couldn't find anything wrong with it. It only does it occasionally but it is a pain in the butt.
And while were on this subject, I purchased a whole Sony system (seperately) and I must say, if I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn't buy Sony Except for the Wega TV.
My system: bare with me as I don't have all the model #'s with me right now.
Receiver - str-de945
cd - cdp-cx400
dvd - s560 ?
tv - wega 36" kvfs12 ?
I bought the megachanger first, then bought the receiver and was absolutly livid when I realized the receiver didn't have an optical 'cd in' but the megachanger has an optical out. I sent Sony a nasty little email and thier solution was to put the megachanger on the optical 'mini disc in' port. That's bullcrap If you do that, you loose the functionality of the remote (the one with the small lcd screen that came with the receiver). I almost took the thing back. Then I purchased the Wega TV and the DVD player and found out the DVD player doesn't have the Control A1 port on it and on certain DVD's (Contact especially) it freezes and skips to a different scene. I can only play that DVD half way thru then FORGETABOUTIT.
Sony doesn't seem to make thier stuff work together well.

 

[PhilH]

And also, I recently had new carpet put in my living room and had to tear down my system. I had the TV sitting on a chest by itself for a couple of days and get this, The remote (that came with the receiver) when it's in TV mode, will change the channels but it will not control the volume on the TV

 

[CameronJ]

Phil,

My first -400 had a very similar problem. For about half my discs, the unit would make lots of loading noises for an extended period of time, after which it would move to the next disc.

After getting my replacement unit a few days ago, the first order of business was to see if it did this again. After loading all my discs into the player, I went through everyone to see if it would load. I ended up with two discs that exhibited this same problem. I ran out of time, but tonight I'm going to see if those discs will load if placed in another slot, and if other discs will load if placed in those slots.

 

[PhilH]

well, how did it go cameronj?

 

[PhilH]

Anyone
I believe you can only put in the cd title, not the song titles on the CDP-CX400....right?

 

[CameronJ]

well, how did it go cameronj?

It worked just fine. In fact, my first test was to retry those two discs in their original slots. One actually played after a slightly longer than normal delay, the other didn't.

I moved the second around a few times, and it finally loaded up without delay.

For both of these, once they loaded once, they loaded fine the 6 or seven times I tried over the next 15 minutes or so.

Also, I'm not sure about entering song titles, but on CD-Rs that I've burned with song titles in CD Text, the titles do display on the front panel.

 

[KeithH]

Phil, Sony megachangers will only allow you to enter the disc titles manually. However, if a disc is encoded with track titles, they will be displayed.

 

[Ken Custodio]

I am using Roxio CD Creator 5.0 and I conntect to CDDB to get the song titles and then I burned the CD's, but my CDP-CX400 cd changer doesn't display any CD information, Can some kind soul go over some steps to copy my store bought cd's so the CD changer will show the CD title info?

 

[Ian Montgomerie]

Within a couple of years, you will be able to buy cheap home "audio jukeboxes" with a hard drive. A hard disc can contain an entire copy of the CDDB database (last I checked it was about the size of one CD). The database could be updated by reading CD-ROMs (which possibly you could download off the internet and burn yourself, using a suitable PC).

I think expensive versions of a few "digital audio jukeboxes" are already for sale, but they don't have CDDB onboard.

Manufacturers are well aware of the possibility of an "ultimate home audio box" to sell to the mass consumer. Imagine a $300 dollar device with a 20+ gigabyte hard disc, a CD burner, and a slot for compact flash memory or memory stick. You could pop in a CD and rip it to MP3, WMA, WAV, etc, building a collection of songs on the hard disc. CDDB would identify the songs for you. The device would have video output capability, so you could hook it up to your TV and display a graphical MP3 browser (incidentally, it would also have a JPEG browser). You could burn some of your collection to CD, or transfer MP3s to your portable MP3 player.

You could also hook up analog or digital audio input, and rip or burn from those. For playback, it could support digital output, and multichannel amplified audio output (for the non-audiophile majority). Complete with bass management, prologic 2, 3D audio algorithms, various effects and soundfields, etc. If the box had enough inputs, it could be used as a cheap receiver.

A DVD or SACD drive would also allow it to play DVD-A and SACD (or heck, even progressive DVD-Video/VCD at the cost of some extra parts. Of course, this would in most cases be a choice vs. having CD burning capability - a drive that can play DVD and burn CD tends to be rather expensive, and I've never heard of an SACD drive that can burn CD. Manufacurers could include multiple drives but then the price would really start to get up there.

A combo box like this would be very expensive to build today, because you would basically have to have a miniature PC inside it. As various consumer electronics companies move toward single-chip solutions for all these types of features, though, you're just left with the price of inputs, outputs, and drives.

 

[Ken Custodio]

In case anyone was in the same situation as I was with the CD Text issue here is a link from Roxio.
http://www.roxio.com/en/interest/music/ecdc5cdtext.html

 

[John_Drake]

I know this thread is old, but I'm new to the forum and just came across this topic. I have a Sony CDP-CX450 Megachanger. In fact it's my second unit. The first one had trouble loading CDs (I sent it back). The second one was better, but still had trouble loading at times. I spent a lot of time watching this thing load a CD three times, then tell me "No Disc" in the slot. It's not that it can't read the CD, it doesn't recognize there is a CD in the slot! Sony tech support was baffled when I called them. I sent it to a Sony Repair Center and it was returned to me with several replaced parts and it works great now. A friend of mine (who knows a Sony repair tech) tells me that these units often ship from the factory with these defective parts. Way to go Sony javascript:smilie('')
furious. For those of you who are having problems with the player loading discs try this. Shine a flashlight through the door and watch it while it tries to load a problem disc. If the player loads the disc but does not spin it, then kicks it out and tries the same thing again (it will try 3 times), it is most likely a defective player, not your CD. If it loads the disc and spins it, then rejects it, then it is having difficulty "reading" the disc and could be a problem with the disc.
Anyway, I like the unit for the LCD Remote and CD-Text option. I agree with those of you who mentioned burning copies of your CD collection to CD-R with the CD-Text option. I am in the process of copying my 250 disc collection. I buy real cheap CD-R and copy them at my leisure. This works great because it's the only way to get song track titles to show on the remote/changer.
I also like it for the grouping feature. I can create CD groups for every occasion or music genre.
I also have a Pioneer DV-F727 300+1 DVD Changer. I love it! But that's another story...

 

[Luke_Y]

I think I have heard of something out there that will let you fill up your changer, and hook it to your computer. Thus allowing you to get cd text from the Internet. Not quite sure if I got that right but I bet that someone here will be able to clarify what I am referring to

 

[Steve_W]

If you are going with a Sony Megachanger, you should really look into Nirvis SlinkE and CDJ.

I have the following system:

1)Sony CDP 355 and M555 megachangers (any 2 discs megachangers will work)

2)A Nirvis SlinkE which takes input from CDJ via RS232 port from the computer and controls the changers

3)CDJ Jukebox software (Free download from Nirvis)

I burned copies of all my CD's with Feurio to put CD Text on them. I then simply loaded them into the changers, and CDJ gets the CDText off of them.

The great thing about this setup is I can drag and drop individual songs or albums if I like into playlists and the changers will play one song while the other changer finds the next song or album in the list...giving you continous music and totally configurable playlists

What you get is drag and drop control of your entire CD collection...CDJ can also be controlled from your AV system remote..