The CD-conformity function obviously is not looking at CD-text

WaveLab
1

Here’s something I came across a couple of days ago - and I found it worth mentioning as it could have resulted in a catastrophe.
WL has in the CD-tab the function to check the CD-conformity. But obviously it doesn’t really check a lot of things - at least not all. The client I was working for had chosen very long titles. So when the mastering was all done, I did what I always do then: I burned it on a (rewritable for environmental reasons!) CD to do the final listen through for any technical errors which might have occurred during the process.
For quite a while now, I have been questioning my method here as I sometimes thought: why not just listen to the rendered DDP that goes to the plant? For gods’ sake I kept my habit!
Because when this time I would put the CD in the player, it showed me a message “unsupported” and wouldn’t play. I checked with another player, same result. Luckily I quickly spotted the CD-text to be the problem. I reduced the overall character-amount - and it worked. I knew there’s some limitation to how many characters could be used as CD-text. While all information I could get hold of would show an amount of characters which wasn’t reached by far, it obviously was the problem of too many characters.
This is another question to everyone reading this: does anybody know where to find the exact specifications for CD-text? Over the years I had been searching again and again - only to find nothing but fragments or obviously wrong information on it.
Hope this will save someone from sending something to the plant which would result into a so-and-so number of unusable copies coming back from it. And of course it would be great, if this issue would be addressed in WL, so that in the next release the conformity-check would also include the CD-text.

2

Hi!

Have you done search here in the WL forum ?

https://forums.steinberg.net/search?q=CD-Text%20tag%3Awavelab-10

regards S-EH

3

That only checks for marker problems and length of disc.

4

The CD-Text specs are a mess if you don’t use plain ASCII because it was designed at a time when Unicode did not exist. Independently from that, it’s a complex text packing system and it is not uncommon to see errors in CD Drive firmware.
WaveLab respects the maximum lengths, I think.

5

Thanks for your reply! But I’m rather sure it wasn’t a problem regarding the use of special characters. I’ve been doing CD-text for years now and never had that problem (with the same CD-player). Also I checked on a second CD-player as described - same story there. And than: as soon as I cut out some of the text it worked.

So I really don’t think it WL does pay attention to the amount of CD-text given. And it would be great, if that will change in a future update.

6

Yes, that’s my impression too - while PG says something different. But the point here is: if the button says “Cd-conformity check” than the result of pressing it should be to be sure that the CD given is working and everything is according to the redbook-standart.

7

This is checked according to the standard.

8

Good, thanks for your answer!

But to set this straight, it would be great if anybody would be able to check this back. If the “standard” isn’t compatible with a CD-player that plays thousands of CD’s (like mine does) and never shows any errors, than it would be good to know if that was just an ultra-rare exception (which of course is possible) or if there’s a serious problem regarding the so called standard.

So the CD-text which caused problems had the following specs: 18 tracks - the longest title having 37 characters the shortest 32 (blank spaces and signs also counted as characters), each track mentioned the artist and the composer (each of them 15 characters long), the CD-titel was an additional 5 characters.

Now once I cut out 6 characters (including blank space and a sign) from each tracks name it magically worked. Before the CD wouldn’t play at all!!! The player just showed “unsupported”, that’s it. And this is something no one wants to happen with a CD that comes with thousand copies back from the plant.

So if anybody could check this with his setup, it would be amazing.

p.s.: in my first post here I wrote I’ve been checking the CD on two different players. This was my bad, because one of them (which I never use for this purpose) wouldn’t read RW’s, so hence it obviously wouldn’t read that one either - no matter what the CD-text would be.

9

FYI, the specs have 2 limitations:

  • size per field (160 characters for ascii)
  • size of all fields (I don’t remember, the Gear CD driver does this check)