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Stations Can't Play Crippled Music Disks
arb writes "The Age is reporting that some radio stations are unable to play copy-protected CDs. It seems at least one radio station is facing problems transferring CD tracks to their digital playout system. Is the lack of radio air-play a price the record labels are willing to pay in their efforts to stamp out piracy?"
I read a recent story on Canada.com about a Vancouver station playing songs from the new Radiohead album that they downloaded from the net ...
Yay! The return of Pirate Radio!
And with great software like TuneTracker (at http://www.beosradio.com/ ), it's easier than ever to run a professional-level radio station with a low low budget.
Well, it is the price they have to pay.......
Call me crazy but I think the RIAA will find a way to get their tunes on the radio. It's a catch-22 though because most early release mp3s come from radio station advance copies anyways. Boo hoo whats the RIAA to do?
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
What I could see happening is the record companys sueing the radio stations and forcing them to upgrade their (radio stations) equiptment.
They will still come out ahead.
Wait, their all owned by Clear Channel. Who ownes them again?
I deleted my sig years ago.
Well it seems that at least in some situations the record labels are in a very funny cycle of self-flagellation. Pissing off consumers AND reducing air play of the crap. Maybe it will teach them a lesson. It might be possible a lot of stations are just dealing with the cds directly though, so I can't comment on that end of things.
;)
Then again most of the crap that has the copy protection on it I won't be listening to in the first place. I try to make a point of supporting labels like Projekt Records who are vocal advocates of music sharing. Of course Projekt is only useful if you are into goth type music.
I think the answer is simple for dealing with crap like this as a consumer, stop supporting major record labels period. There is a plethora of music out there on small labels, or even DIY labels. Even better, use that $18 you were going to spend on the latest bit of top 40 crap and go see some live music. Stop being a consumer and think
-AS
The stations should just fire up WinMX, download the new songs, then transfer them to CDDA. I mean, they already have the right to play them...
Seriously. Actually, I wonder how many radio stations use MP3 as a native format for songs they play now.
- Not multiple stations
- It's not that they can't, they just dont want to
- The article isnt much longer than this post, so you can read it yourself.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Yeah, right. So they're having problems ripping the commercially-released discs into their digiplay systems. All that we'll see happen is a separate release of non-cripped discs for radio airplay stamped 'NOT FOR RESALE, PROMO USE ONLY' or whatever, like they do with singles. I doubt this will even slow down the advance of the use of this technology.
It's not like composers were stupid back then, and that current music is suddenly transcending all the old stuff.
I work in radio, and since WMP's little DRM fiasco, I've been on watch about this kind of thing. So far, afaik, we haven't had any problems with copy-protected CD's and ripping (or at least the FM people haven't come and whined to me yet....). But many stations have had problems with not being able to play "unblessed" mp3's. One of our content providers sent out a memo about a month ago telling stations how to fix their XP and 2k machines that'd been DRM'd. When the EULA change came about, I consulted with our operations manager, and the decision was that WMP would not be installed/upgraded on machines that have anything to do with audio production.
What's more disgusting, however, is the amount of hassle that's involved installing broadcast and/or production software these days. Hardware keys, bajillon digit serial numbers, activation. You think turbo tax is bad. I guess, however, my users never really have to struggle with that sort of thing like I do.
Steve Jobs, if you're listening, there's money to be made in the radio automation business using the Mac platform w/out DRM.
i wonder what the artists say about that when the evil record company tells them: sorry your cd's cant be played on radio
Copy protection on audio CDs obviously doesn't work, e.g. look at Massive Attack's 100th window and google for some of the tracks, like butterfly caught, and you'll find there are ripped tracks floating arround. That's not news to the crowd here on /., there are more than several dozen methods and programs to rip copy protected CDs.
But the point is, if the radio stations do *not* resort to these, if they just put the CD on the tray and try to download the tracks to HD and that just doesn't work, then there's a chance labels rethink the whole thing. They could choose to send custom made CDs to the radio stations (e.g., just data CDs with the audio tracks as wav files) or they could just drop the whole idea because the cost would be too high (from several POVs).
Or perhaps the labels choose to ignore these weird radio stations and all these crap gets less airtime.
Both ways, it's a win-win situation.
Yeah... and read someone elses 'proganda' instead? Never trust anything you read in the media - there's always someone's spin.
Anyways, what's this got to do with CD's?
Not that it matters, after the RIAA's heavyhanded gorilla tactics, I'd already decided to not buy another audio CD - ever. I refuse to give my money to a bunch of government-sanctioned thugs and terrorists.
So the record industry's managed to neuter itself and make removable media obsolete. Boo hoo. My heart bleeds for them. Bunch of idiots.
As long as I've got a normal CD player then I've got a way to "rip" cd tracks. All I'll have to do is plug the tape out from my receiver into the line-level input of my sound card and "rip" the CD track to a wav file. The people at these radio stations should be able to do something equivalent. When CD's first started being used in radio 15+ years ago, the people at the station generally copied them over to the high-fidelity analog tapes they used for broadcast at the time. I don't know what they're using nowadays, but I'd tend to believe that the engineers there could transfer the CD tracks into the needed format in their sleep regardless of anything the RIAA does to the CD.
I do hope that the RIAA understands that the games they are playing aren't going to get them anything. Anyone who WANTS to pirate music is going to do so. This business with mucking with the format of the CD only irritates their customers. I sincerely believe that the whole idea was thought up by some suits who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. Anyone with a clue wouldn't even bother with such an approach.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Soviet Russia hates YOU! (yes I'm violating Yakov's pattern)
This sort of thing is going to hit the public consciousness very soon in the UK, cos over the last two weeks there's been a new TV advert, touting the release of Pink Floyd's 30th anniversary edition of Dark Side Of The Moon using the new high quality SACD (Super Audio CD) format.
Though they mention SACD, no where does the advert mention anything about copy protection. Some people are going to get a rude shock.
Sorry, but I can't see this as anything but a purely temporary issue. The fact of the matter is, yes, some of the current equipment used by radio stations might not be able to handle copyright protection, but as is almost universally the case with digital technologies, this is by no means written in stone.
Sooner rather than later, the simbiosis between radio station and record industry will repair itself and things will return to a state where there will be no need for this news item.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
These RIAA people don't get it... even if they are trying to outsmart everyone with all this DRM- and control-technology, bully us with their lawyers and try to get radio stations to buy special made equipment...
This is a free market world! The money flow depends on this freedom! What are they going to get? Nothing!
I'm not buying anything anymore. And a lot of people I know aren't either. No CDs, no DVDs, no nothing. I'm waiting until they cut the bullshit and let me take advantage of my rights and make the price right again for all that media stuff.
Until then, I'll just NOT listen to music and I'll play outside instead of watching DVDs. Healthier anyway... and I won't go through the trouble of downloading gigs of pirated music and movies either just because these sh17h43dz don't get it.
You're free to join me. Radiostations - get out your old records and play some 60ies sound until then. What counts is p a r t y !
We are all individualists!
before someone realizes that no matter what form of copy protection they use on the disc there is an easy way around it. unless there is a ban on analog inputs that is.
music will always be pirated, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. we (as consumers) have been copying music for decades and sharing it with our friends. we're good at it. are they going to kill radio just to *try* to stop piracy?
i agree with a previous post ^^^^^^ up there somewhere....support the DIY's and save your 15+ bucks to go see a live show. this will support the artist more directly than passing your cash through the industry.
Payola is reason is this a non-issue. Oh, it still goes on. In the lofty world of Clearchannel, it's all about sponsoring contests and event promotion. Nothing quite so obvious as envelops of cash. What you hear on the radio is that which has been paid for by publishers. Nothing as trivial as obsolete CD players is going to interfere with this very long. A couple phone calls and there will be a shiny new player arriving promptly at a studio near you!
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
If you try to curb pirates by releasing deliberately broken media (broken in a way you hope that most pirates will need and thus be discouraged), then you're going to capture a few legitimate users in your net. And with more and more legitimate businesses and operations switching to all-electronic media, it simply makes sense that more and more non-pirates are going to run afoul of these attempts. It's an inevitable consequence.
I bought the new Placebo album the other day (on Virgin Records). It had a "copy control" sticker on the front. There's no Compact Disc logo on it anywhere.
On the back is a blurb saying the disc is designed to play on CD players, DVD players, PCs and Macs. What it doesn't say is that in order to play it on a computer you're supposed to use the software on the disc (hmm... totally future-proof). Furthermore, it autoruns an installer to install the software.
We verified that we couldn't play the disc on a Windows 98 PC using standard audio players. We didn't install the software on the CD, for obvious reasons.
On OS X we were able to play it and rip it using iTunes. On Linux (on a same model thinkpad as the Win98 PC) we were also able to play and rip it.
The shop I bought it from was a small indie, and I notice that in the bigger shops the album doesn't have any copy-control information on it. It's possible that the indie sold me a promo, in which case perhaps they're trying to stop MP3s leaking before the album comes out, or it may be that the retail album is a regular CD (or copy-protected but not so labelled).
The kind of DRM software companies like Macrovision have created changes boot blocks, media player software, audio and video I/O, and CD/DVD drivers, and it is designed to limit the ability of PC users to distribute music. That is, it is designed to interfere with exactly what the business model of the station is and with what the station pays royalties for. After installing it, they may end up not being able to play, say, unsigned advertising clips they get as MP3's from customers, or rip other CDs to disk, or do any of a dozen things that they depend on.
Any radio station would be foolish to let that kind of software be installed on their PCs. These people depend on their PC hardware for their livelihood. If they refuse to install this software, it's because they really don't have much of a choice, not because they "just don't want to".
Now now, lets not overrreact...
Lower interest rates again? Vote!
Assuming these stations have paid the Australian equivalent ASCAP and BMI fees, have the rights to broadcast this material.
IP law is deliberately confusing and can only be sorted out by human beings. (In the case of complex situations, human beings that charge high fees).
There is no way that any simple, inexpensive bit of software can correctly determine whether or not the user does, in fact, have the rights to the use he or she is making.
In every case, of course, the DRM schemes err in the direction of denying use to people that POSSESS rights, never the other way around.
P.S. Yes, I did read the article. This sounds like Midbar's scheme, in which (when it works properly!) the computer still cannot access the real audio tracks, but the special software allows access to lower-quality compressed versions--which can only be played, not copied to the hard drive. So even if the boss had allowed the software to be installed, the station would have probably found that this didn't do any good.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why don't they just sell empty disc, that way no one will ever be able to make illegal copies.
Gah, I'm so smart! *rushes away to make a patent on my new idea*
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
The disabled-disk-anti-defamation-act.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
The RIAA can eliminate the financial losses due to CD piracy in a really simple way...
STOP RELEASING NEW MUSIC!
- Profits will be restored to earlier levels if the labels don't have to spend money on new artists. They're still stuck back in the Elton John days, and have no idea on how to recognise and nurture modern talent. They're full of coke-sniffing old farts hopelessly stuck within their comfort zones
- Radio stations play 90% back catalogue anyway, and this provides a steady royalties stream, especially since the US Judiciary has effectively ruled that copyrights are eternal
- Independent labels will step in to fill the gap, and will likely evolve new business models to
make full use of internet technology
- A renaissance of new musical expression will ensue
Everyone wins!The RIAA gets to keep control of the back catalogue, while the fresher new artists and labels find ways to turn a profit, and perhaps live far better, without having to suck on that toxic nipple of the RIAA ripoff recording contract.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Any wonderful Arista artists like Santana, Whitney Houston, Pink, TLC or Kenny G.?
Maybe when a big-name star with serious legal representation (like Celine Dion) finds that she's not getting airplay because the record company crippled her product, we'll see some progress made against copy-crippled cds.
Oh. My. God. Could it be that Celine Dion could save us?
Funny thing is, I stopped listening to the radio for anything other than traffic reports around 1993 or so. It's not like I'd have even noticed...
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
So, I can't listen to music I don't want to hear on a radio station I don't listen to? This is a problem how?
I stopped listening ot music on the radio anyway. I just listen to talk radio now. It's more entertaining. I like that comedian Rush Limbaugh, he can't be serious. Radio just has the same songs over and over adn there is never anything new anymore. There are never any new artists it seems but you can always hear new stuff online from artists that are never heard of on the radio, and most of them are much better than the same old artists droning on over and over.
and until now I've made wav-Files of any CD out there. Now I have a copy of every "protected CD" and one more in my Ogg Vorbis archive (oggenc -q5). Still wonder why the people use an obsolete audio compression codec generation like MP3 or others. Schugy
Soon, no one will be to play any of their copyrighted CD's.... The perfect way to stop infringment, and consumerism.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
These CDs should be referred to as "playback challenged." Don't get me started on the retards at the music companies.
If the radio stations are unable to play this music on the air, then the labels won't get billed for payola (oops, independent promotion costs, sorry).
Of course, without payola driving radio airplay, creating buzz about a song (and sales) will be difficult...
...Of Nelson the bully on "The Simpsons"
"Ha Ha!"
Everybody now, in unison, and with gusto - "You Fucked Up! You Fucked Up!"
...Santana is good. The others suck a teeny tiny schlonger...
How long until someone writes alternative firmware for CD drives that allows the reading of the audio tracks the same way the CD player does it?
This basically means: enable/disable multisession support.
Many CD recorders allow the flashing of new firmware. Some CD drives probably as well.
The problem may be the number of different makes/types of drive on the market, but of course many of these share the same design.
Considering that the RIAA is making CDs without the official "Audio CD" label, aren't they technically violating the DMCA? They did, after all, reverse engineer the compact disc standard, to make a disc that can be played on otherwise audio CD compliant player.
Even though there was never any official encryption to begin with (and those who analyzed the CSS code probably consider it as minimal), that doesn't give them the right to perform an illegal act. The CD technology IS patented, and covered under international law as such.
Making a "Not-CD" (subliminal joke there if you say it to yourself out loud) in essense violates those patents, even if they removed the Compact Disc logo.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
The publisher of the german computer magazine c't has started a database on copy-protected audio CD's. They call them "un-CDs' (roughly 'not-CDs'). Unfortunately so far this is only in german.
s =suche
Query page:
http://www.heise.de/ct/cd-register/default.shtml?
Master page:
http://www.heise.de/ct/cd-register/
Feedback to
cd-register@ctmagazin.de
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
You mean millions of people hear the song on the radio without paying for it? Sounds like piracy. There could obviously never be any benefit to lots of people hearing a song without paying.
I have some knowledge in how radio stations work these days and a great many of them are totally computerised. For example, MegaMix2002 (http://www.soundsoft.net/) is a very popular radio DJ package. Basically you have a computer with this loaded and it does everything for you. The DJ controlls it, and that is all. Well, the way it works is by ripping CDs to MP3s and storing those on the computer. Much more efficient for the DJ to be able to call up anything with a few clicks than sorting through stacks of discs. Ok, so, if the discs are designed such that they can't be ripped, they'll screw over MegaMix along with other ripping apps and hence screw radio stations.
These days, radio stations really are just using the same technology as a normal user. They ahve specialised apps and some speical hardware, but at the heart is just a standard PC.
I always thought they received 'non commerical' and 'special release' disks as part of the licensing deal, and didnt have to goto the local store to buy them like the rest of us.
Why wouldnt those be un-protected? RIAA cant be THAT stupid.. can they?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not multiple stations
... excuse me, don't want to fork out the $$$? I can't fly a plane ... or should I say, I don't have a license or plane or criminal mind to steal a plane? The idea that they should not install multiple possibly conflicting foreign software, in binary form, with unknown side effects, is common sense.
Unless that station wrote all their own software, and unless that station has a monopoly on hiring programmers, it's a reasonable bet that other stations have the same setup.
It's not that they can't, they just dont want to
Yes. I can't drive 200 mph
The article isnt much longer than this post, so you can read it yourself.
Reading actually improves if you think about what you are reading, so you can do it yourself.
Infuriate left and right
Massive Attack's 100th Window had copy protection! First I heard of it!!! Shoved disk in, ran CDex, out pops MP3's. EASY!!!
I have over 200 CD's, all ripped into MP3 and AAC. Never had a problem.
First off I haven't heard of any problems at our station so far...
However, we're quite flexible in how we can populate our playout system, Dalet in our case. We can use good old analog from a regular CD player, rip directly from CD or get them off a digital distribution system that runs in the UK called Fastrax.
Fastrax involves each station getting a machine and an ADSL line with the client software. The machine connects to Fastrax and allows you to download tracks that the record companies have chosen to distribute
This is a pretty minor non-issue for the record companies I'd imagine. If radio stations are having a difficult time playing CDs with copy protection then one of two things will happen.
1. The record companies will simply send radio stations CDs without copy protection. It's not like it would be difficult for them to run two versions of the CD.
2. The radio stations will simply download the songs they want to play (probably after obtaining a copy of the physical CD to counter any potential piracy lawsuits down the road.
Either way, the radio stations are going to play the songs and the record companies aren't going to really care much. This isn't a major issue.
--
RumorsDaily
"Could it be that Celine Dion could save us? "
She already does.
If I'm really horny and my wife is away on business, I just look at a picture of Celine and the horniness goes away.
Like magic.
I don't doubt it was difficult for her to have children. No doubt it involved a lot of drinking and a lack of light.
You can't even explain what "impeachment" is.
But that's okay. most people who oppose this war still think Saddam is just a misunderstood prankster.
That's because not all versions of Massive Attack's 100th Window were released on copy protected CDs. If I remember correctly, the US release of this album was not copy protected.
I picked this album up on release date at Coconuts in New Jersey, and my copy wasn't copy protected.
... Poetic Justice.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I wonder how this copy-protection is affecting RPM's http://www.tophitsusa.com
When I was in radio a couple years ago, everything we played came on these 4 or 5 discs mailed to us every month.
Of course, it was small market radio, and we were still playing analog carts, vinyl and cd's manually.
Since most illegal mp3s come from critic and radio advanced copies, why don't the labels digitally watermark these advances? Of course the problem would be you'd want a unique mark for every copy (so, I assume, you could find the source and not pick on a bunch of kids who picked it up). But just burn them onto CDR then.
Then if a copy is found online, diff it with the original, and find out who leaked it.
Or maybe I'm oversimplifying things. I guess if you could make the key seeding random enough that it wouldn't be easy to wipe...
What is music when you despise all sound?
He had an ANNEURISIM, you dork!@
Why are you attempting to stir things up?
I personally stopped listening to the radio sometime around 1997 when Radio Free Hawaii went off the air. It was radio democracy with ballot boxes around the state. It had better music than any other stations and without the horrible 4 hour rotation that most mainstream stations use. (They figure that most listeners spend 2 hrs a day w/ the radio, so they rotate to make sure you hear the hits). Of course thier ratings were at the very bottom according the Arbitron rating system wich they refused to subscribe to. From what I understand Austrailia copied the format... but I'm not sure if its still going down under.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
We have a computerized system at WSUP and yes copy protected discs pose a problem. Of course we can bring it in via analouge but thats a generation of loss and hella work for me. Whats the point silly RIAA and Big 5 record labels. Whats the point.
I guess I have no sympathy for the music biz, and, equally, no sympathy for the Kazaa crowd.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
FWIW, my copy is copy protected (says so all over the CD). I just had to tell the CD to read it at 1x speed and that was it. One hour later I had oggs sitting on the HD.
Yea, great idea. Except I would skip that last donate step.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
All this means is that it will take a little more work for radio stations to play new music so often that I never want to hear that particular song again. As far as I'm concerned, radio stations that have a generic and nationwide "every two hour" playlist have done more to damage the music industry than file trading.
------
There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can't get away.
The obvious message the recording industry is trying to get across to us is: If you want a CD that you can actually use and enjoy rather than one you have to fight with and that might destroy your equipment, you are expected to download the files and burn it yourself. I don't know what could be more clear than that.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I'm not sure what the album's title really refers to, but in the context of that (Radiohead) article, the title seems just a touch ironic.
Sigs are bad for your health.
No, a P2P service like this would never work, no one is going to waste their storage, bandwidth, time creating the original digital files, and the rest, just so that someone "in charge" of the P2P system can charge for the sevice and the RIAA can make more licensing money. In the days of Napster and free p2p systems there is some implicit incentive to do it, but a fee charging p2p system would never be able to get people willing to pay a fee and also put up the original content to start such a system off. One might (although I have doubts) be able to do it from a central server, but not on a p2p system.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
it would be possible to get around it, of course, but how many of the people that get these CDs would know how or even know to do it?
However, this would totally change the way things work today (and yesterday) because most of those free advance CDs are given away to friends (partly because most of them are crap, others because "you've got to hear this!" or as a way to make the friend shut up and stop his/her begging). After giving away a CD or giving it to a used CD store (it isn't hard to find "for promo use only, not for sale" stickers on CDs in used CD stores), the tracks will eventually find their way online and will be tracked back to the magazine writer, radio station, etc, that the disk was originally given to. And then no more freebies for the friends of the rivileged.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
for the big fish like Clear Channel to either:
1. Get some lackey to rip the disk and distribute the result to its member stations, or
2. the music industry will perform seperate releases for said fish.
Either case does little for us. We will still get the pleasure of paying even more per track than we do now. That installer and its media files take room that could be filled with the music that is supposed to be there in the first place.
Oh wait! I forgot, that is what the bonus CD at the low price of only $16.99 is for. That other good track will be there in case you missed it being on the main release....
Blogging because I can...
Lets see how long it takes for a radio station to be knocked out of operation because they bought a computer with XP or are using a newer Media Player for some function, and Microsoft decided to exercise it's stated right to disable any other software on the system it feels like at any time. At some point the world beyond the slashdot geeks has to start waking up to what's going on around them and what's wrong with it. I think this is a great first step.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
> If I order (online) 3 CDs from France, the odds are that one of them will be copy protected.
France already surrendered.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
It even works pretty well with a dial up. And it doesn't need an email address. And you can shut off chat.
Repeat: To the folks in the US who use dialup (that's 90%), WinMX works for you. And you can even upload, so you don't have to be a stingy bastard.
I've got tons and tons of Dixie jazz on vinyl from New Orleans by black artists that are now dead. And none of it's available on cassette or CD, the stuff is gone. And now the rest of the world can enjoy these artists.
Perhaps this is the station's way of saying 'RIAA you better wake the fvck up and back the fvck off.'
It won't take too many artists being 'blacklisted' and getting ZERO airtime before they catch a clue.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Nope. If you have the CD on display for sale, you can play it without paying any fees.
I work on post of a daily soap, and we have lots of music coming off of CDs.
Two and half years ago we were still transferring stuff via digital outputs in to our workstation(custom rig-not a PC or Mac), before we moved to Protools. Since then we've been ripping out music to HD, which a great time saver.
For a year now we've had the occasional copy protected CD. Some are ripped just fine, others let the damn machine crash.
By now almost every new CD is protected. We are starting to lose time over this and our time is damn expensive. At some point in time, when we have to tranfer too many tracks with 1xspeed again the post crew will put forward a proposal to ignore copy-protected(rather prohibited) CDs. Legally these things aren't even CDs and I'm very curious to know what'll happen, should our production company contact the Label people with the request for unprotected material.
I don't suppose they'll drop stuff from copy protected CDs, but I shure wish they would. These bloody things are getting on my nerves and at some point I'd just like to drop material that comes on non-standard, i.e. faulty media.
In the interestss of accuracy, according to the article, it's just one station (not "stations") that is having this problem.
Music companies which use copy protection may be denying the artists under contract to them legitimate play time on radio stations, if the happenings at one outfit are any indication.
Furthermore, the problem is easily remedied with the purchase of a $59 standalone CD player. I bet they could get a listener to donate one.
The station in question has no standalone CD players, just desktop PCs (all running Windows 2000) and a couple of old Denon CD Cart players.
Is this a cutting-edge use of technology, or a cutting-costs use of technology?
Edith Keeler Must Die
The record labels will start circulating non-copyprotected promo disks to the stations. Radio DJs already get the CDs they spin on the air for free often. This would be a fairly minor cost for the label to pay, and they get to keep their copy protection scheme.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
...and just start selling CDs that nobody can listen to? I know I'd buy them!
Let's see: They copy-protect CDs so that people don't distribute them and push down the profits for "the artists" (read: greedy record lables). In doing so, they cut their own throats now that radio stations can't transfer them to DAT, which equates to less stations playing the music, less exposure for the artists and less profits for "the artists".
Irony anyone?
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
I thought Philips already said that since copyprotected shiny silvery discs could not be called Compact Discs because they broke the Redbook audio standard. Did this just go away? I think we need to come up with a better name for the discs, perhaps Compact Frisbees.
I'm not really up on audio technology, so this is probably a stupid question, but...
If these "protected" CDs work just fine on a regular CD player, why don't computer component manufacturers just make CD drives that work like "regular" CD players?
Enough of this and this should fling a significant amount of mud in the RIAA's eye.
This sig no verb.
Since most of the indie stations are getting wiped
out by large chains of rebroadcasters, like ClearChannel,
this turns out not to be a problem. The music company
simply sends an unprotected version to the 10 or so
networks that actually matter, and they keep selling
the crippled media to all of you. Problem solved.
I'm quite heavily involved in student ("college") radio activities in the UK. Our station has started to receive several corrupt data disks, disguised as CDs. I've written back to the promo companies, informing them that we won't be able to play anything off their broken disks. Our professional broadcast-standard CD players are quite fussy about playing disks that conform to the CD specifications.
The reply I got was along the lines of, "So what? The record companies need to do this to stop illegal piracy of music." I sent a rather condescending e-mail back detailing the problems that our station, and many other stations, will face.
Fortunately, most of the stuff we play (and receive) comes from small independent labels who still largely distribute their material on CD or CD-R -- so it hasn't hit us too heavily.
There's a student radio conference in a few days which I'm going to -- it'll be interesting to ask people from other stations if they're having problems with being sent these corrupt disks. If this thread is still thriving, I'll post back with a comment.
-
As an aside:
Anything based on CD Paranoia code seems to happily rip copy protected CDs. On my home machine, I've happily ripped Christina Aguilera and Avril Lavigne's CDs, as well as numerous others that are standard-deficient. This was using ExactAudioCopy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) under Windows 2000.
In practice, as long as you use decent quality equipment, this does sound like a practical way to run a radio station. If the DJs are in control or the music, it lets them find and queue up material quickly, and arrange it so they can easily go from one tune to the next or cut in to talk or patch in commercials, and makes it easier for things to run on autopilot if they need it to. And with the changes in disk drive cost over the last few years, they can store a few thousand songs at decent compression levels. On the other hand, if the radio station is one of those centrally controlled things that don't have real DJs at each station, they can upload each song once and cue things remotely.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Shorten is a lossless audio compression system that typically gets about 2:1 compression. It's used a lot by the etree jam band music trading community, which tends to start with audience recordings and doesn't want to degrade them further (unlike the old days on Nth-generation analog tape copies :-) That obviously takes a lot more space than small MP3s, but it still lets you fit twice as much music on a disk drive. So that 120GB disk drive that cost $120 at Fry's can now hold 240 CDs (Hmmm... I think the CD jukeboxes I saw could hold about 200 CDs for about $200. I remember when the computer WORM drive jukeboxes were more like $100K for that kind of capacity :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The real problem is that most music radio stations have converted over to completely computerized and programmable systems then laying off the DJ's. One DJ can program music for 5-10 radio stations. All content is recorded and played back.
So it seems they couldn't rip the CD because it's not Redbook standard and their digital systems cannot read the proprietary tracks and formats. Same thing as trying to play it in a PC or Mac.
Good, I am happy the radio stations are having trouble as well. I hope it hurts the music business! The dirty bastards!
But had they simply not laid off all those DJ's they wouldn't have this problem. There is a single rock station left in my state that is still independent and run by real live DJ's. These guys kick butt and take names. All the other stations are lame as hell.
106.9 WCCC in Hartford Connecticut is the only local Rock station left! Out of 99.1, 105.9, 102.1, 104.1; they have all been bought out and dumbed down! 106.9 is the only one to play requests and they are the only ones to give away prizes to the local audience only! The other corporate stations lump you in with 25 other stations across the nation to compete for prizes, etc.
Also due to the RIAA, they've effectively killed online radio stations which were bringing back a revival of independent broadcasters. But due to the insane licensing they get forced out!
Geeks need to get together and bypass the corporate music giants. Make our own independent labels that actually pay the artists and provide the fans what they want. We do need to be careful to do it legally though!
Hell let fans download the music for a reasonable fee! WTF, this should have happened 3-4 years ago! The new media is being held back by the evil corporate greed and fear!
I am positive there are a ton of great musicians out there that are never going to be mainstream but will win fans worldwide if the world could only get to their music! We need a non-profit group that can help the Indie artists above and beyond sites like MP3.COM which actually sucks.
While it's possible that the boss's "didn't understand" meant that he was a Luddite who was scared of anything that sounded complicated, it's much more likely that "didn't understand" included not knowing exactly what the undocumented copy protection software was going to do to his machines, or what software designed to prevent you from doing things would prevent him from doing, or whether it would mess up the software that he's using to handle music beyond what a basic MP3 player would do, given that copy-protection applications are _designed_ to mess up software like that. Or it could mean that he didn't understand what, if any, legal remedies he'd have if the copy-protection software messed up his station software, but since it was probably a cross-jurisdictional thing, he didn't expect to have much remedy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Even though there was never any official encryption to begin with (and those who analyzed the CSS code probably consider it as minimal),
IANAL but seriously what's encryption legaly? We know that somethings definataly aren't and somethings definatesly are and there is a lot gray in the middle. You maybe right pulse code modulation might count, but I hope not.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Just tell them to use ISO buster :) That way they can rip the disk and save it to a proper CD.
;)
Proudly sponsored by "Cactus Shield Doesn't Work"
heres an idea, sue them for that amount and then use it to either crush them by starting labels and doing it right (they dont have that much money on hand) or use it to hire snipers to take out anybody in executive management. while your at it take out the drug czar and put him out of our/his misery. please.
Back in the 80's, taping radio program was considered as almost a form of piracy. Probably this is the way the record companies to inconvenient the radio station. For the radio stations that are still using the "conventional" method, this wouldn't a problem at all. natural selection would determine what method would prevail.
It's ASDFing to the Ultra!!!!!
...alternate song version?
I'll bet you it will go something like...$19.50 per CD for consumers, $1950.00 for radio-playable song copies.
Wait and see....they'll find a way to profit from this.
Yes, that much is quite apparent. But the really stupid thing is that they blindly pretend that this small loss by going through an analog phase is enough to discourage copying, while at the same time they are agressively fighting mp3 users. Mp3's do vastly more harm to the audio quality, even at high bit rates, than a pass through the analog world with good equipment will ever do. They are willing to fight mp3s, when an mp3 user just might go out and buy an album to get a good quality copy of the songs, but at the same time tick off buyers with legitimate uses of the product they bought, and some of those will turn to making analog rips that will be far higher quality than if someone was given an mp3 file to preview a music group!
Of course, their ultimate goal is to have DRM in every A to D converter in the world, so that no one can use them to re-encode audio. Not very likely, considering the legitimate uses of A to D converters that would not work well with this, and the huge number of existing A to D converters out there. So instead they just tick off the consumer and complain that sales are not growing fast enough to suit them.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It's one of thse stations where the songs are preloaded a month in advance..and the DJ's make $20,000 a year to make funny quips in between songs. They have no say. Oh, and you THINK they are playing your request. They just say OK if it's the next song queued up! (My uncle has a second job to pay the bills:) )
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
The sooner these b@st@rds wipe themselves out, the better!
If a giant oil company wanted an abortion, would W's head explode?
I need a test tone cd tomorrow morning before the stores open. I have a cd burner. Anybody know where I could find and download a file which could be made into a test tone cd?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
That depends on your source. If you're using one of the P2P services, that's probably what you'll get. If you get your music fix from alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*, though, it's more likely you'll see high-bitrate (often excessively high, like 256 or even 320 kbps) MP3s encoded with LAME or other decent encoders.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
This really screws the event DJ who uses a computer for mixing, like NI's Traktor (been playing around with it lately, really cool).
The computer can do things that only very, very expensive DJ CD players can, but I guess the RIAA would rather have the DJs just play the song, without using loops, effects, etc...
-twb
Depending on you country, retail stores may be able to buy from the local distributor, or inport the records themselves, or even by another distributor.
This is paralel importing.
The indie store might have bough the record from a local importer, while the large store bought ist elsewhere.
if i can't buy the CD and play it on my computer and stereo, i'll just download a pirate version and burn that to CD, then i can again do both.
The question is, are there more people in my situation, or non-pc-literate people that can only pirate music because the P2P programs have a nice user interface?
I was in the same situation before DVDs came out, in my experience purchased VHS were HORRIBLE quality, you get a much better quality version by pirating movies.
As the head of music at a student radio station in the UK, I've seen a large increase in the amount of copy protection issued on the promos that I get week after week.
Standard practice for our playlist system is that I rip the CDs to an MP3 format (using Xing), and then wrap the MP3s in a WAV header (for track information). This has become more difficult recently - as most people will know, some of the copy protection systems split the audio up into a bunch of really small data tracks followed by a huge long one. This can be easy to deal with in the software (just merge the tracks, and kill the white noise at the end), or it can be impossible to deal with (in that Audiocatalyst doesn't recognise any data on the disc at all).
As stated elsewhere, all the copy protection schemes include "music software" for PC/Mac playback. The most frustrating thing about this is that for the most part, the software playback of the CD is at some ridiculous quality (like 43kpbs). It has become easier for me to bring along a hi-fi to the station, and do most of my reviews on that (and take a mini-jack/mini-jack cable with me for A/D transfer). It's pointless to do this to us - anyone who would actually go as far as to violate the promotions agreement either by passing promos on or ripping them is not going to be stopped by some cheap 'n cheerful protection scheme.
The fools (damn them).
Sarcas
--
Make a man a fire, and he'll be warm for the night
Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
If you were charged with writing a policy statement that expressed your interest in protecting consumer rights, what would it say? Ideally it should be concise and unambiguous, and speak to the "fundamentals" such that specific cases could be derived from it. Does anyone have such a beastie already?
Constitutionally Correct
Except for Fox news, of course. They're mostly unbiased.
I copied my 100th Window release from Vinyl to CD (for the ease of it and because the album looks too good/is too heavy to continuesly take it with me when playing music)
Though some protected CD's do not work in some DENON players which are being used all over Belgium.
I have an article of this on my site. www.zkboi.nu/cd
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Homer (in traffic jam): The traffic report will get me out of this one!
Bow Wow Wow recorded the song "C30, C60, C90, Go" in the early 80's about that very topic. The song encouraged people to tape songs off of the radio rather than buying (unaffordable) records.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Some people of average or higher intelligence, including the radio station mentioned, filter our downloads so that only those above 192kB/s are shown. Easy.
Nah, the trillions of dollars they want to rape from college kids will more than fill the gap.
LOL. That's a good one. Made me shoot milk out my nose! :-)
So maybe the record industry will fix itself, then? Maybe RIAA will have to go after ... RIAA for lost profits?? (Monty Burns style "Exxccceleeent" here) :)
are the views nice, up there on your high horse ?