Foreign Characters in CD-Text

By Nick Landis on Monday Mar, 28th 2011

I've had several projects in the past that were Spanish language music.  With most music sung/written in Spanish, they had titles that were also in Spanish.  Spanish, along with several other languages, is different from English due to a few extra letters in the alphabet (letters with accents and the like).  Several words had accents that without the accents meant other things.  I knew I could encode several of the accents that showed up some places but not others.  Almost every player that regularly showed CD-Text would give up and show a blank square when they came across a character with an accent.  Other places the characters would display correctly.  That means that the information is on the disc!  If it shows up in even one place, that means it is there.  Until now, my suggestion to leave the accents off to avoid the 'blank box of doom' that most players display. . .

Additional information on the ISO/IEC 8859-1 Character set on Wikipedia