Hacking the Starbuck's Muzak Machine?

llamaluvr asks: "My friend is employed at a Starbucks coffeehouse, and he told me about a system they use for controlling what kind of music is played in the store. The machine can only play a particular type of CD, which contains 90-100 songs that "expire" after awhile, and is appearantly compiled/ produced by Hear Music, a subsidary of Starbucks. PlayNetwork is in charge of the the hardware. Anyway, he and his fellow employees are sick of Starbucks lame playlists, and they can't use normal CDs, as the machine tells them that the CDs are "expired". Does anybody know anything about how this system works? Is it at all possible to make a CD on your own that can be played on these machines?"

Comments

Unplug

[isorox]

Unplug the jukebox, take the speaker wires and maybe the amp, and plug a normal cd player in. Simple.

More info

[inkfox]

Can you get your hands on an "expired" disc to look at what's on it?

Chances are it's just got a date or an ID on it, no signing or anything fancy like that, meant to keep stores from playing the wrong disc or from having playable music if they don't continue to subscribe.

I'd dump an image and look for something nonstandard in the TOC. If I were making a player that locked users out, I'd put it right there so I could use a standard CD player and just add code to compare the tail of that buffer to a 16 bit date number or such.

If you're really unlucky, they might actually be going so far as to put this on a special kind of limited use disc (a unique Disc Application Code in the Wobble Track), but it's unlikely they'd go to that expense unless this is a very popular and expensive service (which it may well be). At the least, I wouldn't be surprised if it were an audio disc and not a data CDR. I believe gcombust can tell you what DAC was read when a disc was inserted, and that might tell you more.

By the way, if it does have a special DAC, you're screwed without getting special media pressed or modifying the player. You can't write a wobble with a regular CD burner.

Back in the old days

[SuperguyA1]

Back in the old days we had to be more clever to circumvent this kind of thing, fortunately specialty stores still sell these circumvention devices

Public Performance != Fair Use

[automandc]

Before you go too far down this path, consider that any music played in a retail establishment like Starbucks is technically a "public performance" and would need to be licensed for that purpose. The reason SB uses that kind of technology is (probably) because they pay licensing fees as part of the deal, hence the expiration (it is a limited use license).

Most stores don't bother with this, because they are not going to be targeted by the RIAA. However, Starbucks is using music to create an "ambiance" meaning that the music is part of their product, and the patrons are expected to linger and enjoy it. Thus, they are "selling" the music as much as the coffee (even if you don't want to pay for it).

Plugging in your own CD player, or hacking the system in order to play your own music will make Starbucks libel for copyright infringement, which I imagine they wouldn't appreciate.

Sorry, I suggest you forget this endeavor.