John,
There is some confusing information as you phrased your question.
Commerical audio CDs do not have album artwork embedded in them. Album artwork is maintained in several online databases. Computer media players such as WinAmp or Windows Media Player reads an identifier file from the CD then accesses one of the online databases to obtain the CD artwork, track list or both. Sometimes, the online database will not be available or you use Windows Explorer to examine a CD and you will see track names as TRACK01, TRACK02, TRACK 03, and so on. But when you double click and play a song from the CD you may see the artist name or the name of the song. That's because textual information can be embedded in the songfile but it's since it's part of the song file, not the CD, the textual information is not available until a song is selected. Another thing you might notice is each song file has the file extension ".cda" instead of ".wav". That's because the the cda is nothing more than a shortcut link to the actual sound file data and the sound data is hidden! Commercial audio CDs are sometimes called Redbook CDs because the software and hardware standards were first presented in a book with a red cover.
Sometimes you will run across an "enhanced CD". One of these CDs is an audio CD but it also has features of a CD ROM data disc. A Redbook standard audio CD holds no more than sixty minutes of music. A blank CD can hold 74 minutes of audio data so there is a lot of room remaining for artists to add computer friendly files such as artist profiles, bio, photos or video clips.
Three of the more well known CD databases are: Amazon, discogs and freedb. You can find a more complete list below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w...online_music_databases