How to put song titles on a burned CD

Write them as CD-Text. Burn by Zaweba puts the album name, the artist and every track title onto the audio CD as CD-Text, which players and car stereos that support it show on their display. The titles come from your music files' tags, and you can type or change any of them on the Audio CD page before burning.

Without CD-Text, a home-made CD shows up as Track 1, Track 2 and so on. With it, the display reads like a shop-bought album.

What CD-Text is

An audio CD stores music as plain tracks with no file names, because it was designed long before music files existed. CD-Text is an addition to the format that stores text alongside the music: the disc title, the performer and a title for each track. A player that understands it can show the names. One that doesn't simply ignores the text and plays the music as normal, so adding it never stops a CD from playing.

Adding titles in Burn

Start a new audio CD from Home, Disc > Audio CD or File > New audio CD, and drag in your music. Burn reads MP3, FLAC, WAV, OGG, Opus, M4A and AAC, WMA, AIFF, APE and WavPack files, decoding them with its own FFmpeg. Where the files have tags, the track titles and artist are filled in from them.

Check the names on the page and correct anything that's wrong. Tags from different sources are often inconsistent: one album says the artist in full, another uses an abbreviation, a third has the year stuck on the end of every title. Tidy them now, because once a CD-R is burned the text can't be changed. Then type the album title and artist for the disc as a whole.

Put the tracks in order by dragging or with the arrows, decide whether you want the two-second gaps between tracks, and turn on normalise if the tracks come from different albums and play at different volumes. Watch the minutes used against the disc, and burn.

Names that read well on a small screen

Car stereos and hi-fi displays are often small and may scroll or cut off long text. Short, clear titles read better than long ones with extra notes in brackets. If a title has a featuring credit or a remix name, consider whether it's needed on the display. Keep the album title short too, since some players show it more often than the track names.

If your music comes from Play by Zaweba, it can send a playlist to Burn, which opens the Audio CD page with the playlist's tracks and their names already filled in, ready for a final check.

When the titles don't show

Not every player supports CD-Text. Many older and cheaper ones don't, and some computer programs look names up online instead of reading the disc. If your CD shows no names in one player, try it in another before assuming anything went wrong.

The same titles are useful away from the player. After an audio CD, Burn offers labels and covers with the track list on them, printed as an A4 PDF with crop marks. And when you later save one of your own CDs as files with Save audio CD as files, Burn tags the tracks from the disc's CD-Text, so names you typed once follow the music around.