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BMG Stops Producing CDs
An Anonymous Cow writes "The register has a new story about claims by Bertelsmann that they'll stop manufacturing uncrippled audio CDs. More can be found on Bertelsmann's own site (info by region, Europe only). Trouble playing it in your car stereo? According to BMG the error is your player's, and not their CD's. Quote: 'As far as we were advised, our copy protection is according to the Red Book Standard as well as all labelling on the cd.' In English: they don't even find it necessary to indicate on the CD cover that it's copy protected, nor do they think it advisable to listen to Philips' objections against using the CD logo on crippled discs, instead there's a label claiming that the CD is fully Red Book-compliant. It looks like this is a test case, because only all European CDs will be crippled."
Yep, hit 'em where it hurts!
It's the ONLY power we have, let's use it.
It's probably a waste of time, but what the hey. There were only 1734 signers when I signed today - let's /. it! SIGN HERE!
Arista Records
BMG U.S. Latin
Buddha
BMG Asia Pacific
J Records
Yclef Records
Logic
RCA Records
RCA Victor Group (includes Private Music, RCA Victor, Red Seal, and Windham Hill)
Robbins Entertainment
Zomba Label Group (includes Brentwood, Jive, Jive-Electro, Reunion, Silvertone, and Verity)
They also distribute ATO, Kinetic Records, Milan, Razor & Tie, Restless, Santuary Records Group, V2 and Wind-Up.
And I'm sure I've missed a few....
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Probably because they don't risk the huge lawsuits that could easily be the result in the US.
I made the mistake of buying the new Foo Fighters album without reading the small print (...contains copy control technology, will play on a PC (windows) using software contained on the disc...). So I feared the worst by the time I got it home. However, it plays fine in WinAmp, rips without problems with Audiograbber, and plays fine in XMMS under linux. So either their copy control technology is useless, or they're trying something sneaky, whatever that may be.
Incidentally, the Compact Disc logo doesn't appear on any of the packaging or the disc itself.
-hgavin
Exactly how does this work, slashdot wants to know. Do you lose part of the first track, and just how wide does the marking have to be? If I can read between the lines, the "crippling" involves munging the TOC data in some way? If it can't read this bogus data, I guess the player just starts playing tracks at the point it can read, thus treating it as a read error, and recovering the stream if it can. Is that about right?
Doesn't this also mean that you can still read off the disk as data (computer CD player), and ignore the bogus TOC data? Windows probably won't cooperate, but other OSs should, right?
Just bought the new Bond CD. (Universal, not BMG).
Popped it into my Mac. The CD mounted, but wasn't recognized as an audio CD, so it wouldn't open into iTunes and I couldn't transfer the songs onto my iPod.
Scanned the CD case and discovered that the CD logo was nowhere to be found. I guess I should have checked for that first...
The funny thing is, all the tracks showed up as AIFF files, so I copied them all to the HD. Double clicking them opened them up in iTunes. A quick convert to MP3 format and I was all set! Yay, Jaguar!
Shhh. Don't tell the RIAA about this...
BMG has sales of $X. They start shipping CDs with copy prevention methods, poor copy prevention methods that result in their CDs being unplayable on many ordinary CD players. Their sales plummet, to $X/2. They can't argue it's piracy, because this loss of sales has happened after they've taken steps to reduce piracy.
Indeed, it may well be that they end up hurting their own argument. If sales plummet when piracy is no longer rampant, then legislators could take the view that piracy isn't a threat and actually make the laws more liberal.
I'm not sure you need to organise a boycott of BMG. Just encourage people to return CDs that do not play on their equipment. If the vendor tries to make this a problem, send the CD back by registered post and have the credit card company issue the refund - that means buying all CDs by credit card.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"On the other hand, independent Music City Records released a copy-protected CD by Charley Pride with no sticker to warn users of possible problems. That led to a lawsuit by a Marin County, Calif., woman who discovered the disc wouldn't work on her PC. Music City settled the case without paying damages and agreed to label copyprotected CDs. More significant, Philip$-the company that co-owns patents on the CD and licenses that ubiquitous "CD audio" logo-says it is considering yanking the logo from all copy-protected CDs."
-Time Canada, 6/3/2002
In the American language maybe, not in the English Language
...
From a current English language style guide:
Apostrophes
An apostrophe is used to indicate the possessive case or a contraction.
For singular nouns place an apostrophe before the s.
The mayor's meeting (the meeting of the mayor)
For most plural nouns place the apostrophe after the s.
The councillors' meeting (the meeting of the councillors)
For plural nouns which do not end in s add 's to from the possessive.
The children's toys were left out in the rain.
For contractions the apostrophe is used to indicate missing letters.
can't (cannot)
they're (they are)
I'm (I am)
An apostrophe is used in the word its only when indicating the contraction of it is.
It's raining
The possessive its has no apostrophe.
The Board announced at its annual general meeting
Do not add an apostrophe to shortened forms of words or years to make them plural unless for a possessive case.
MPs
1950s
but
UNE's Board of Governors
the MP's electorate
MPs' electorates
For the possessive of a phrase, or compound title, or of a statement of joint ownership, add an apostrophe to the last word only.
The Prime Minister of Australia's house
Mary and Bob's farm
If the ownership is not joint, add an apostrophe to each name.
Elton John's and George Harrison's songs
What do you mean, encoding?
The red book standard is as naked as it can be. Basically it provides for:
1) A TOC. Table of contents containing information on track start and stop time. Generally a lead-in and lead out apply, taking approximately 25 Mb space on the disc. The rest is reserved for the body of audio data.
2) Digital wave info. A 44.1 Khz stereo wave recorded digitally onto the CD's surface. This is done in a non-encoded (let's not get caught in the semantical discussion on digitising vs encoding, please... ) way. There's not even any ECC or EDC information in that scheme. The CDDA red book standard is a butt-naked RAW audio data standard.
The Red-book standard technically does not allow for fancy schmancy stuff such as mixed-mode discs, multiple sessions (which is how mixed mode is made) and such.
Adherence To The Specification WILL mean that a CD will be playable in any CD-player that has been made since 1981. Period. This is a non debatable point.
I have a sony in car cd player, the one that can play mp3s but not copy protected cds. I was a little annoyed until I found that my old pioneer 6 disc scsi cdrom drive drm624x that I used to run on my amiga (its 4.4x not 24x speed btw) could rip copy protected cds flawlessly when used with cdparanoia (linux cd ripper utill made by the same people as ogg vorbis). Ebay has these units for $15 each. They can be got elsewhere I suspect that Google may be able to help there.
What do you mean, encoding?
Actually there is some encoding done, but not for protection reasons. EFM (Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation) represents every byte as a 14-bit number. The bits are arranged to maximize bandwidth usage and more evenly distribute the bits (so you don't have stretches where there are no pits/bumps on the disc).
The encoding is as simple as a lookup table, and is again designed only to maximize bandwidth. You can actually fit more data using 14 bits representing each byte than you can with 8, simply due to the physical characteristics of the media. Found a link with a bit of info. I guess technically Modulation is the word, but it is a form of encoding.
And there is some error correction in this (CIRC), also described at the link (not in much detail though).
I agree with your other points, though. These CDs can't be redbook compliant. I believe the redbook standard covers all aspects of the CD, from the data itself to the physical medium, though I haven't researched that in quite some time...
On that note, some newer Sony car stereos (two I have experience with, one from 1997 and one 2001) still have a very difficult time with burned CDs (yet I can play an audio CDRW in my $25 portable). Only if I burn at 2x and on particular brands of media (oddly, Sony CD-R's aren't one of them) will they play reliably.
I'm sure these "copy-protected" CDs would have trouble with these Sony units as well. I would have thought Sony of all people would have more robust CD units by now, but apparenlty they're using cheap (out-dated?) components... most CD/DVD players sold these days will read anything you can throw at them.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
In a recent public letter, the Rolling Stone disses the record company executives totally over this kind of crap.
Excerpts from the letter:
"Because of you, my kids will stop wasting time listening to new music and seeking out new bands."
"No more harmful exposure of thousands of bands through Internet radio, either."
"Don't worry, computers are just a fad anyway, and the Internet is just plain stupid."
Actually, chances are he was referring to the group of four women who mix classical scores to dance beats and recently released a new CD. Their first one, "Born," was outstanding.
There's not even any ECC or EDC information in that scheme
You soooo don't know what you are talking about. Amazing how you got a +5.
Ever hear of Reed-Solomon? Look it up. It is the reason you can scratch a CD and usually it still plays without a hiccup.
Does this mean that I cannot listen to CDs on my computer without being concidered a consumer without respect to listening pleasure?
More importantly, if this was happening in the U.S. it would definitely have a smell of a class action lawsuit against both sides - BMG and CD player manufacturers (including CD-ROM). Look at it from consumer's point of view:
"This CD player, or CD-ROM, or PC I bought has a CD logo on it... This CD I bought from BMG also has a CD logo on it. Then why in the hell can't I play this CD? Somebody must be lying to me and ripping me off! I'll let the judge decide."
Where are the consumer protection groups in Europe? Anybody awake?
No, we win. When the feds bust down my door and see all my legally owned indie label mp3s on my various players they can quietly walk out after giving me a written fucking apology.
There are many resources to discover not only non-RIAA music but GOOD music. Webcasters, college radio, epitonic.com (one of my favorites and they stream 128kbs), USENET, the music listings in your local paper, etc. The information and easy access to it is there, the question is whether the RIAA complainers will use it or just continue to copy and trade top-40 music thinking they're sticking it to the man.
What these schemes will accomplish is allow the industry to say to Congress, "Look, we tried copy prevention on our own, it didn't work, we need new laws that require DRM chips in everything."
(incidentally, Barbara Simons mentioned in a DRM session at Siggraph that she believed the DVD CSS cipher was deliberately made easy to break, as a similar form of entrapment)
Philips wants five thousand dollars for the Red Book, and requires that you sign an NDA. But if you want to learn the details you can buy the actual international standard, IEC standard 60908, for CHF 226 (about $156).
Other good sources of technical detail about the CD Audio format are:
- The Art of Digital Audio by John Watkinson
- Principles of Digital Audio by Ken Pohlmann
Both of these books provide fairly detailed explanations of the data format, but for the actual physical specifications you have to refer to the standard.