If I make a mix CD using iTunes and give the CD to someone, is there something I can do that will result in iTunes populating the artists and titles when that person puts the disc into their computer with iTunes running? Feel free to make fun of me for not knowing how to do this.

What do you mean by "populating" exactly?

Person puts disc into computer, iTunes is running, and instead of the title being "Audio CD" it's "Johnny's Cheesecake Mix" or whatever I'd titled the mix as a playlist. And the tracks, rather than being called "Track 1" and "Track 2" etc. the actual song titles come up. When you put a store bought CD into iTunes it does that. But when you put in a highly-circulated bootleg, it also does it, which means me think you can do it for any disc.

A buddy of mine owns a bar and asked me to make a bunch of mixes for him to play there through his iTunes which is rigged through the PA. So I'm trying to make it easier for him by avoiding giving him track listings that he'd need to manually type into iTunes when he loads the mixes.

Oh, the metadata. Yeah, just fill it all out before you burn the disc. Make sure you do so for all the IDs.

if he's playing it through itunes, why not just burn id3 tagged discs of mp3s?

Although they tell you that you can't do this unless it's a commercial CD, I've submitted my mix CDs in iTunes to CDDB (it's under the Advanced menu on iTunes 7 for Mac). I've tested them in iTunes on a different computer and had all the track info 'download' or 'populate' from CDDB onto that mix CD on another person's/computer's iTunes. So yeah, you can do it.

In other words, fill out the metadata.

Of course, but that info doesn't just show up on a .wav formatted mix CD when you plug it into a computer that the mix wasn't created in. At least it never has for me. Uploaded mp3 files from data CDs, sure.

There are all sorts of tools that allow one to edit metadata tags. Regardless of format, fill out the track's metadata properly on your PC and it will show on any device that can read ID tags.

How do I do that?

Signed,
The Limited One

the trick here, is that the ID3 tags you tag your mp3s with do not carry over to the raw audio CD format. however, the CD standard allows what is called "cd-text" that can supply this data, no cddb or musicbrainz needed. you need to find a burning program that supports converting your ID3 tags into cd-text

^^^You can include that CD text in iTunes as well. It's under the Burning tab (Edit>Preferences>Advanced>Burning).

By default, iTunes includes/converts the CDtext when burning.

With iTunes 8, this menu now pops up when you try to burn a CD.