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More Copy Protected CDs?
Mahonrimoriancumer writes "There are a lot of CDs that have been released recently which can't be played on the computer or *laugh* ripped. Apparently only a few markets have the 'copy protected' CDs while the rest don't. Here is a list of some that are 'protected.' Does anyone know of other CDs with this problem?" I own at least one CD on that list and it ripped just fine, so perhaps that are different versions of the CDs on the market
They can rip these CDs. They don't use the CD drive's analog playback function. Their drivers were designed to play CDs digitally all the way drom disc to speaker, and are not vulnerable to this copy protection thru intentional corruption scheme.
Now I wonder how long it'll be until someone sues Apple for making too good a CD player. Or forces them to downgrade their drivers.
Copy-protection shouldn't affect Winamp anyhow since it only affects digital playback, and Winamp uses analog playback (unless you swap out the CD player plugin with one that uses digital ripping).
I am told however that cdparanoia (which is *nix-only and very popular on Linux) can properly rip copy-protected CDs (I assume by using the error-correction data) so it's very possible that CmdrTaco had a copy protected CD but cdparanoia took care of it for him. It's much more likely though that whoever reported the CD as copy protected just didn't know what they were doing -- cheap CD-ROM drives in tandem with MusicMatch or RealJukebox will barf on some CDs that good CD/DVD-ROM drives coupled with cdparanoia or Exact Audio Copy will happily rip.
More likely, the lawyerbots will work as hard as they can to prevent the sale of "circumvention devices" such as software that can circumvent copy protetion. Look for them to go after open source projects such as cdparanoia in the near future.
Finding God in a Dog
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.
It's pretty clear to me why records companies are distributing both clean and copy protected versions of the same CD. They are collecting statistics on consumer acceptance for the copy protection scheme. They release two versions and then look at the return rates for the two versions to figure out how many people have CD players that reject the copy protection scheme.
jeff
Except, the requirement to use the little CD icon is paying money, not meeting the standard. They never claim to meet the standard anywhere.
If you sell something as a Compact Disc, you are advertising that it meets the standards for a Compact Disc. Philips/Sony licenses the logo, but they do not verify conformity with specs for each item that bears that logo. It is the responsibility of the manufacturers using the logo to assure that the products that they sell meet the specification for audio Compact Discs.
Licensing issues have nothing to do with false advertisement claims. Suppose I license the USB logo and then produce a "USB mouse" that doesn't work with the USB ports on most computers. I would still be guilty of false advertisement even though I licensed the USB logo.
You can usually get around this by going into the Winamp "Options" by clicking in the top left, and going to Play: then "Audio CD $CDROM" where $CDROM is the correct drive letter. This lets me play 99% of the Enhanced cds i have.
Its possible they could do that, say change the intro ever so slightly. However, I am a pretty lowly possistion at this station and I have access to it. Even the janitor could make a copy. We are in a Level 4 market, but lets say the RIAA uses one of those watermarks we have heard so much about and then goes onto audiognome and picks up the latest Britney Spears song and it happens to be one someone here ripped and encoded. Then they go back and match it to us, etc. Well, at that point the RIAA comes to us and we just say oh, it must of been (someone we just fired). Sorry, but hey, which artist do you want us to put in heavy rotation?
... but do I worry? Nah. After reading your post I gave a friend of mine a call up at a different radio station here in town and he brought me over their copy of an issued cd (both of our stations are owned by the same local company and we have a slight programing overlap). I slapped them in the machine and ran through a dupe check. Sure enough his CD matched ours bit for bit (acording to this program). So, at least for this cd in this one instance, no such thing I can see is in use.
Yes they could do it
Also - to get to your first question, what would stop them? We have a contract that says basically we get these 'raw' coppies so we can air and play them. For example, they would be in violation if they sent us a remix of a song that edits something out when we requested it w/o. If they watermarked our music and then tried to bust our station, they too would be in breech of contract. Thus, it would turn to be a bunch of lawcrap where in the end nothing happens and both groups end up jerking eachother off...
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