Do most music CDs contain the needed info about their tracks?

I see that many audio players (I mean multimedia software like Winamp or Foobar2000) have the ability of searching music information on databases like CDDB. Shouldn't such info already be available on the music CD itself? And is it there?

Some players display the CD contents and others do not. Is that info taken from the internet or the CD?

Shouldn't such info already be available on the music CD itself?

I think most of us, as consumers, would say yes.

And is it there?

Almost never in my experience. Certainly the software I have used to rip CDs to MP3s never seems to be able to obtain this information from the CD itself. I have read of a few exceptions (notably Sony since 1997).

There are probably several reasons for this, including:

1. Music-industry business-model
2. Inertia
3. The rise of digital distribution

Business model

The music industry traditionally made money from the sales of vinyl-records, cassette-tapes and audio-CDs. Protection of their copyright was seen by the industry as essential for their survival. To combat illegal copying of tapes they persuaded legislators to impose a levy on blank tape sales.

The music industry felt that facilitating playback on personal computers was facilitating the infringement of their copyright and thus facilitating their own destruction. So decisions concerning audio-CD contents and formats were heavily skewed against making anything easier for personal computer users.

Inertia

The audio CD has been established for a long while and there is no point making new CDs incompatible with existing CD-players. This means that care has to be taken if adding digital content to audio-CDs. Digital data and audio data on CDs use completely different and incompatible underlying formatting. This makes it tricky to mix both - though this can be done.

Given a large population of old CD-players, the industry has evidently not seen a benefit to them of "improving" the audio-CD format.

Their perceived use case is: You buy a CD, you put it in a dedicated audio CD-player attached to an audio-amplifier and loudspeakers. You sit down and read the track information printed on the CD cover.

Digital Distribution

Nowadays the trend is to downloadable content, at least paid-for MP3 files generally contain metadata for artist, album-name, year and genre etc.

It therefore seems unlikely that the music industry has any interest whatsoever in doing anything new with their CD pressing process. Its a dying business after all.

One of the greatest, coolest, but sadly least known and least often used tech things about CDs is "CD-Text." ... This has been out for 14 years and I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually SEEN a CD in my car have text associated with it.

^{From a 2011 blog}

Make that nearly 20-years now and no sign of general adoption by the music industry.

Why did CDs originally not incude metadata?

It is worth remembering that the audio-CD was merely a more durable and convenient-sized replacement for the pressed 12" vinyl album disc.

The latter was a purely analogue form with no digital information on it, just the analogue audio waveform in the form of vertical and horizontal undulations in a continuous spiral groove - with no distinction between tracks other than usually (but not always) a section of silence (no undulations) and wider spacing of the spiral (visible to humans bot not detectable by record-player). Any information about track names etc was present in the printed paper sleevenotes or on the printed cardboard sleeve itself.

So when audio CDs were invented, they took the same approach. They expected CDs to be played in dedicated CD music players, not in computers. Therefore the music was not stored on the CD in the sort of filesystem that a computer would normally use for data files. details of tracks were printed on the paper insert in the plastic CD-case - not placed in the CD contents in any way.

Similarly the audio data on an audio-CD was encoded on a single continuous spiral track. This is very different from the low-level formatting of computer data disks (hard, floppy, CD-data, etc) which typically have a large number of circular tracks arranged concentrically and divided into sectors.

There was no provision for data, probably because this had not been needed for vinyl records and because it would have complicated the manufacture of audio-CD players and made them more expensive at a time when the industry presumably wanted to encourage sales of CDs as a premium, and more profitable, product.

Note that, to identify a CD, programs on PCs have to extract some of the audio data (e.g. the list of song-offsets in the lead-in section of the track or the waveform of part of the first song) and use that as a key for a lookup in a database, typically a remote database elsewhere on the Internet. This is how software retrieves artist-name, album-name, track-name etc.

Some programs do look for CD-Text, sometimes only if they are offline and cannot contact a remote database. So presence of and use of CD-Text is a relative rarity.

There is no computer-readable metadata in most audio-CDs, not even an identifying product number.

The specifications for storing music on CDs is called Red Book.

There is an extension for Red Book called CD-Text. It allows for storage of additional information (text as album name, song name, and artist name) on a Red Book compliant audio CD.

Some hardware players are able to read CD-Text, however not all discographic labels include that information on the CD.

Software players as AIMP, Foobar2000, MediaMonkey, Media Player Classic, MusicBee, RealPlayer, SoundJuicer, Toast, VLC, Winamp (from V 5.31) and Windows Media Player (from V 10) can read CD-Text.

After asking this question I thought to make a test on 10 audio cds of classical music. They are produced in various countries, mostly in Europe, but one or two in USA.

First, on the CD-Text part - the info contained on the cd itself that is therefore accessible offline: the thing to do is to see the info that various players display offline about different audio cds.

In my test 3 out of 10 cds contained such info that was accessed offline. (One of them, here).

Disabling the wifi, some Linux players, Amarok, Xine and Kaffeine, have accessed the tracks titles of all these three cds. Audacious, Deadbeef, Rhythmbox and VLC have accessed the info of two of them.

All but one of these CDs had in common some labels that might worth mentioning:

Super Audio CD (SACD)

and

DSD (Direct Stream Digital)

Testing the Windows players mentioned in another answer I found that Winamp, AIMP, MediaMonkey and VLC could read CD-Text, but Windows Media Player and Foobar2000 could not.

It therefore seems clear to me now that the CD-Text info is absent on the majority of audio CDs and therefore in most cases audio players need online access to get the proper data. But from my experience CD-Text is not absent and cannot even be called rare...

More details on the ability of different Linux players of accessing these types of data in my answer here.

Not intended as an answer, but it doesn't quite fit in a comment. Actually, even the oldest CD Audio standard made it possible for a wealth of meta-data as a very slow bit-rate on the side of the audio data. It's actually so heavily utilised, that not just the track number, and the TOC (with the track offsets) are stored as meta-data, in the lead-in silent seconds, but even the mins:seconds display is actually read from the disc itself, as it goes! The players did not contain too much of a logic to actually count the time from the start of the track, but simply displayed what they have seen in the bitstream meta-data, as the P&Q (PQ) subcode. If you would want to be weird, you could possibly make the time appear to go slower/faster/backwards, or stop. Not that I'm aware of any disc doing it.

It was though possible to influence the track offsets so that the first track was a couple minutes into the disc, so you could scan back, and listen to a hidden track.

Any actual meta-data was very under-used though, sometimes you could see index marks inside a single track, separating parts of the same song/piece. I can only think of excuses why this metadata wasn't used. Most likely it wasn't seen as a differentiator, as most people would be interested in the actual artist's album, and not in another one, no matter how much metadata was on there :)

Perhaps it was even seen as an expensive feature to author the CD with all the meta-data, perhaps the studios didn't want to spend any further money on it on their cost.