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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."
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.
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...
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.