Feurio Questions & Answers - Questions on CD-TEXT:
Character set for CD-Text (Special characters)?

Question: What characters am I allowed to use with CD-Text? Can I use special characters (Umlauts), small letters etc.?

Answer: The character set for CD-TEXT is ISO 8859-1 (modified). This character set essentially corresponds to the Windows character set, i.e. all Windows special characters can be used - including German umlauts.

LIMITATION: Not all CD-Players are capable of showing all special characters!
It can well happen that some CD-Players don't show all special characters correctly!
It is a question of the display on the CD-Player in particular.
Most CD-Players have got a point matrix display and can thus in principle display all characters (of course with varying clarity depending on the resolution of the matrix).
There are also CD-Players however which have got a segment display in which the characters are only made up of lines (similar to the well-known 7-Segment-Displays on digital clocks and pocket calculators. Naturally these displays can not display many characters based on principle ($, §, @ etc. can for example not be displayed sensibly by these segment displays) - such characters are partially replaced by blanks. Furthermore, as a general rule, these displays can not display small letters.
All players with segment displays, which we have come across so far have however correctly converted small letters into capitals (even German umlauts) and thus have a correct display. So based on our knowledge up 'til now, you can burn small letters - if the player can't display them it will show them as capitals.
But you can't depend on it - if you really want to be sure that CD-Text is displayed correctly on all players (e.g. if a CD is mastered), then to be safe only use capital letters and no special characters or umlauts!

See also:
Questions and Answers - Feurio! CD-Writer: Questions on CD-Text
Questions and Answers - Feurio! CD-Writer: general questions
Questions and Answers - Feurio! CD-Writer: problem-solving
Questions and Answers - Main page

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