To determine whether a record medium loaded on a drive has character information in a management area of the record medium corresponding to data received from the drive and to obtain the character information when the record medium has the character information as the determined result. A system includes an optical disc drive and a host computer 53 connected through an interface 42, wherein the drive has a servo and signal processing portion 30, a system controller 41, and a CD-ROM signal processing portion 50. The servo and signal processing portion 30 reproduces data from a disc 21. The system controller 41 controls the entire operation of the drive. Return data is sent from the drive to the host computer 53 corresponding to a read table of contents (TOC) command received from the host computer 53. A code that represents the data length is contained in a header of the return data. With the code, it is determined whether or not the disc 21 is a CD-TEXT disc. When the, disc is a CD-TEXT disc as the determined result, the read TOC command is re-issued. Thus, CD-TEXT data is obtained.