Editing Digital Compact Cassette (section)

=== Auxiliary track ===

On prerecorded tapes, the information about album artist, album title, and track titles and lengths is recorded on the auxiliary ninth track continuously for the length of the entire tape. This makes it possible for players to recognize immediately what the tape position is and how to get to any of the other tracks (including which side of the tape to turn to), as soon as a tape was inserted and playback was started, regardless of whether the tape was rewound before inserting or not.

On user tapes, a track marker was recorded at the beginning of every track, so that it was possible to skip and repeat tracks automatically. The markers were automatically recorded when a silence was detected during an analog recording, or when a track marker was received in the S/PDIF signal of a digital input source (this track marker is automatically generated by CD players). It was possible to remove these markers (to "merge tracks"), or add extra markers (to "split tracks") without rerecording the audio. Furthermore, it was possible to add markers afterwards that would signal the end of the tape or the end of the tape side, so that during playback, the player would stop the mechanism, fast-forward to the end of the A-side, or switch from the A-side to the B-side immediately.{{cn|date=May 2017}}

On later generations of recorders, it was possible to enter title information for each track, which was recorded on the auxiliary track after the start-of-track marker. Because the title information was only stored in one place (unlike prerecorded tapes where users could see the names of all tracks on a tape) it was not possible to see tracks names of any other track than the one that is currently playing.{{cn|date=May 2017}}

There are some minor compatibility problems with user-recorded titles; for example:
* On stationary recorders that had simple [[fourteen-segment display]]s, all track information had to be converted to upper-case because on those displays, showing lower-case characters is impossible. They were capable of displaying symbols that are impossible to enter with their own track information editors (such as the apostrophe).
* The Philips DCC-822/DCC-824 car stereo with DCC player had a full [[dot matrix display|dot-matrix text display]] which could display upper-case and lower-case characters on prerecorded tapes as well as user-recorded tapes.
* Later-generation portable recorders DCC-170 and DCC-175 were capable of displaying text information from prerecorded tapes, but not from user-recorded tapes. The DCC-175 was capable of writing and reading the text information to/from a super-user tape via the PC, but does not show the user-recorded text information on the display.