Song Titles, Artist, Album names in burned Playlist

I have an extensive music collection, but most listening is to playlists. I have tried to follow all hints, suggestions, and directions found (even purchased Uniconverter). Unfortunately, I have never been able to produce a Cd which will play on a car audio system and display song names, artist, etc. on the player screen. Can someone please outline a step by step procedure for either beginning with an existing playlist, or creating one, then continuing through all of the steps necessary to produce a playable Cd with track and artist info displayed.

Win version 10 (10240)

Thanks for the reply. Although I am not aware of the specific capabilities of my CD player, it is a factory unit in an 2018 Subaru Outback, so I would expect it to have reasonably modern capabilities. Frankly, I can live with either Mp3 disks or traditional audio CD, as long as I can exhibit the information. If you can let me know the definitive way to check the tagging and info, I'll make sure, but the right click on "properties >content" within the playlist (Windows Media Player), contains all the relevant information (Song title, Artist, Album) for each song entry.

larryinmissouri said:

Thanks for the reply. Although I am not aware of the specific capabilities of my CD player, it is a factory unit in an 2018 Subaru Outback, so I would expect it to have reasonably modern capabilities. Frankly, I can live with either Mp3 disks or traditional audio CD, as long as I can exhibit the information. If you can let me know the definitive way to check the tagging and info, I'll make sure, but the right click on "properties >content" within the playlist (Windows Media Player), contains all the relevant information (Song title, Artist, Album) for each song entry.

Are you familiar with tagging in general?

MP3tag is the most commonly recommended application to control tags.

Typically, tags control what is shown on a player's display panel.

You could have "Jingle Bells" by Elvis tagged in such a way that the player will display it as "I Walk The Line" by Johnny Cash.

Here's what I do:

Suppose the song in question is Mystery Train by Elvis Presley. It's an ordinary mp3 file.

I name it EXACTLY this way:

Elvis Presley - Mystery Train.mp3

Note the space before and after the dash.

Using MP3tag, I then FORCE the tags on that file to match the file name. So, the artist field will be tagged as Elvis Presley and the title field will be tagged as Mystery Train. And therefore, Elvis Presley will be shown as the artist on my car player screen and Mystery Train will be shown as the title.

I don't care about any other tag fields like "album" or "year" or "genre" or whatever. If you do care about those fields, you can set up MP3tag to include those items.

If I had made a typo and named the file Elvis Presley -Mystery Train.mp3, then MP3tag would NOT tag the file because I had not included the space after the dash. That's good, that forces me to be accurate in file naming.

You can force the tags to match the file name in MP3tag with a simple right click on the file and then making that choice from a menu.

See MP3tag window of my Elvis folder on my hard drive below. That right click as shown will force the tag to match the file name.

I do a lot of CD burning for my recording studio clients. I use NERO BurningROM to burn audio CD-R's. If you want titles, artist, etc to appear you burn "DAO" (Disc At Once) method. Whether the burned info appears varies with the audio CD player. I have a 2015 Ford Flex and the song and artist are displayed on my system.

Also, burn the audio CD-R at the slowest speed of the burner drive (usually 16X for SATA burner drives). Higher speeds won't play on some audio CD players. My Audio burn speed is 8X as I have older PATA burner drives that are capable of the lower speed).

Here are a couple screenshots from Nero:

Thanks again to both of you. The Mp3 tag sounds really great and I will undoubtedly try it. Unfortunately, most of my digital music is stored on the native Windows Media Player format, so to use this system universally, I would need to conver every entry in the library. But, I'll probably isolate a few playlists, grab those native files and convert them ( probably with Uniconvertor) , and try to tag them as you have explained. Thank you very much for the clear concise explanations, and the screen shots helped a lot.

larryinmissouri said:

Thanks again to both of you. The Mp3 tag sounds really great and I will undoubtedly try it. Unfortunately, most of my digital music is stored on the native Windows Media Player format, so to use this system universally, I would need to conver every entry in the library. But, I'll probably isolate a few playlists, grab those native files and convert them ( probably with Uniconvertor) , and try to tag them as you have explained. Thank you very much for the clear concise explanations, and the screen shots helped a lot.

Do your files have a wma extension---rather than mp3?

That alone may prevent them from playing in a car.

Yes, the music files are stored in the WMA format. But remember, "playing" them is not an issue, the car player will play them, just won't display any info (artist, song, album, etc).

There may be a way to tag WMA files. I have no idea.

Even if there is a way, your player may not be able to display them....on WMA files.

You are subject to the peculiarities of your player.

Subaru likely had someone else build it......JVC, Kenwood, Pioneer, etc.

I can certainly convert them to Mp3, especially one playlist at a time and store the Mp3 files separate from the main Library directories. There is no doubt a third party builds the systems. Their GPS is done by Tom Tom. I know this because it has the idiosycracy of the entire stored memory being volatile and should the battery be disconnected, every stored destination, route and waypoint is lost. Neither my wife or I could believe this as, you probably know, when having any service performed by a dealer, the first "instruction" is to disconnect the battery. Inquiries to Subaru as well as Tom Tom produced a bunch of "I didn't know that" replies, but other than connecting an auxillary power supply to maintain the GPS, no one had an answer. Since we travel by car a lot on vacation, having directions and points stored from the areas we visit is valuable to us, but it seems the cell phone generation is in control and "there's just no need" to store a location when you can just look it up again. Anyway, I fully expect (at this point) that the CD player is reflective of at least average features today and I'll bet the Mp3 tagging will work, but being lazy, should I discover a way to encode the information in a WMA format or even the standard commercial CD format CDA (I think) I'm fine with that.