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Back in July, BMG caused an uproar over the bugs in its copy-protect scheme which rendered many CDs unplayable. Even given Universal's generous promise of unquestioned returns, this latest attempt to copy-protect seems likely to generate a lot of resentment.

It would be interesting to know what kind of copy-protect they're devising that results in such profoundly "unplayable" CDs. Some of the major players attempting to win the early lead in the copy-protection tech field include TTR Technologies and Midbar Tech.

CD Media World discusses how to create a copy-protected CD. Personally I wouldn't want to, but I think it's interesting to see the business maneuverings and keep abreast of the technological tricks they're trying out on us.

That's just the problem. Your digital out IS affected. I personally own one of the CDs on that list, and when you play it and for example let a Minidisc unit record it through a digital out, it totally fails. Every single bit missing is interpreted as a stream interruption and causes a track mark, thereby flooding the disc with 254 tracks in the first few minutes.

Now this may seem MD-only, but the fact remains that these are errors deliberatly put on that disc, and nothing less, which are propagated through a digital out as well, thereby providing you with what is, in essence, a faulty low-quality product.

The hilarious part is that the solution to the MD problem is ripping the track to your computer using cdparanoia (works fine) or a similar ripper, and play back the WAVs through a digital out on your soundcard. Resulting in uninterrupted WAV data (the ripper fills in the blanks) which can be played back perfectly. In essence, in order to make a perfectly legal recording on MD for yourself, they are in fact forcing you to rip it to your computer, which is what I s'pose they are trying to prevent.

Another thing that bothers me is that when I put that particular disc in a drive on a Win box, it fires up a proprietary binary cd player which plays back the disc. I do suspect it doesn't play back the data but some highly-compressed version of the music stored in a relatively large data file on the data part of the disc (haven't checked the quality, was too pissed at that moment). So they are also forcing you to use Windows if you want to hear it play. Forget Macs, forget other OSes.

And for those interested, the disc in question (Natalie Imbruglia's White Lilies Island) was proteced with the Cactus Data Shield 200, which is noted in small print on the booklet.

Well It seems that I have picked up a copy protected CD despite all my intentons not to do so. But it's not from Sony, Universal, or Atlantic ... it's from a small european label, dependent records (be sure to use the fish for the guestbook). And from teh sounds of their president in his release is that lots of other european labels are starting to use copy protection as well. He even gave us the type of copy protection used... Cactus Data Shield from a company called midbar. So if the little guys are using it, and the big guys are using it well... I know I will be purchasing less music.

An article posted here suggests that Midbar's Cactus Data Shield may already be a moot technology. According to the article Plextor drives can read protected CD's (which normally cannot be read by CD-ROM drives). Also CloneCD can remove the Cactus protection.

According to this page at Midbar, it is said to be "fully transparent to the consumer." It claims to work on "existing commercial players and drives". It's not really clear to me whether it can be played on older devices or not.

I'm the author and maintainer of a Windows (don't flame me) dll for ripping CD audio, and so this interests me a great deal. But the bottom line is this -- if it can be read by a standard CD player, then there's no way that they can rip-proof it. Since it's quitting time here in Europe, I may head down to the local record store and see if I can't find either of these two CDs and get back with some hard, technical details, rather than the marketing hype from the article and Midbar's web site.

They sell a device which goes between the data source and the mastering equiptment, so it can't be fiddling with the format too much. I would guess that they screw with the formatting information that gets written (such as the block headers and whatnot)

From their web site:

Simple to install and operate, the CACTUS DATA SHIELD is a one-station, stand-alone automatic device that is installed in-line between the data processing station and the LBR mastering system.

Transparent to the content provider, there is no need to modify content or its delivery systems. In addition, CACTUS DATA SHIELD does not affect the pre-mastering process or require production machinery modification.

The CACTUS DATA SHIELD can also be seamlessly integrated with commercial mastering and production equipment.