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Michael Jackson Releases Uncopyable CD
Derek Jeter writes "NTK.net is reporting in their weekly newsletter that another copy restricted CD has surfaced, this time Michael Jackson's newest single, "Rock Your World". "When loaded into the CD drive, the disc spun continuously as though the drive was trying to access the TOC of a blank or corrupted CDR." Ughh, Doesn't this violoate the Red Book Standard?" I wonder how long before MP3s of this song exist despite the copy protection. So far its just free promotional copies of the single. I tell ya I'm gonna be pissed the first time I buy a CD and discover I can't listen to it in my computer.
Why do a d/a or a/d conversion? Just about any CD or DVD player costing more than a few hundred bucks comes with a digital output these days. We just need to take that feed into a soundcard with a digital input. I doubt you could get a bit-for-bit copy, but since most people are compressing to MP3 anyway the difference should be negligible.
As others have mentioned, the other option for fighting this is tearing the plastic wrap off and then demanding a refund because the CD isn't Red Book compliant and won't play in your CD player. In other words, it's defective.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Remember when businesses found out that ripping customers off was more profitable?
The blames lies at least partially with us, for acting like cattle and continuing to support these things. We still buy Nikes, we still use Microsoft, and (some of us, I would imagine) still listen to Michael Jackson.
Got Rhinos?
...but where on the CD case does it say that it conforms? As a matter of curiosity, does this CD actually have the "Compact Disc--Digital Audio" logo on it? Even if it does, does this mean that it complies with the standard--or does it mean only that it will play on players that comply with the standard?
I used to wonder about the companies that broadcast scrambled pay-content over regular television broadcast channels. Weren't THEY violating FCC standards by transmitting a non-NTSC-compliant signal? Didn't seem to matter...
As for PC vendors, they've been playing fast and loose with standards for ages. I remember first getting into this with people that kept insisting (incorrectly) that the Apple ][ generated NTSC video. Apple in fact had a carefully worded but misleading statement that said something like "the video is designed to be viewed on monitors that comply with the NTSC standard." That is, the signal was (way) outside the NTSC standard, but the NTSC standard for MONITORS requires them to be very tolerant...
I keep hearing horror stories from DVD enthusiasts. Apparently, in this year of our Lord 2001, it's not at all rare to find DVD X that plays in player A but not player B... and DVD Y that plays in player B but not player A. Not because of copy-protection or anything like that. Just because of bad standards, lame engineering, and NO watchdogs.
You know the sort of thing... the standard may say you can do thus-and-such, but very few DVD's actually do it, so lots of DVD players can get away with not implementing it quite right...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I bought a CD from MP3.com and it will only play in my CD-ROM drive. The CD is a hybrid format with some Windows only CD player attached to autoplay. All of my CD players choke on it, thinking it's a bad CD.
You can get bit-for-bit copies from the digital output of your CD player. For debugging a sound card driver, I once recorded some data from a rather dated Kenwood CD player using its digital output, and compared it to the data ripped by a Plextor CD-ROM drivers. Guess what: after synchronizing these data streams, they were identical. (And that despite of the terrible digital jitter introduced by this old CD player!)
Of course, there are problems: If your sound card cannot sync to the external clock provided by the CD player on the signal, some resampling occurs from time to time. The situation gets worse with those popular sound cards based on the AC97 standard: this standard mandates a fixed internal sampling frequency of 48 kHz, so resampling is always required when recording from a CD. Sometimes, this resampling is implemented so poorly that using the analog inputs of the sound card gives better results...
I think that most systems that use differences between cd-players and cd-rom can be circumvented with a modified cdfs.vxd .
You should find it by searching for cdfs.zip at google.com.
If you are interested in this topic then check www.cdfreaks.com . It has often news about audioprotection.