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New Anti-Swap CDs Hit Shelves
floppy ears writes "Watch out for the new Anthony Hamilton CD, Coming From Where I'm From. The CD has two sets of tracks: one set of "encrypted" songs that can be handled by CD players but cannot be ripped, and a duplicate set of tracks in WMA format. In CD players, the disc plays normally (in theory). When put into a computer, the disc installs software to keep the music secure, but allows you to copy some or all of the Windows Media tracks to your hard drive. What a shame that I'm running Linux and my portable MP3 player doesn't support WMA."
The last time someone made an copy protection scheme for "CDs", didn't it only affect the first track on Linux? And even that could be gotten around? It's really simple - just rip everything but track 1 using CDParanoia.
Don't buy it.
I do not like the idea of a cd installing software such as this.
So how many hours do you think it takes for this to be cracked 2-3 hours?
Where there's a will, there's a way!
Shut up.
..autorun on CDs is bad, mmkay!
Oh wait..
i l) -2003-WCR
Anthony_Hamilton-Comin_From_Where_Im_From_(Reta
hit the net about 11 days ago.. damn.
If it was easier to buy mp3's than rip them off (searching p2p's or whatever) and if you could get all the benefits of pirate mp3's - listen anywhere, have a copy at home and on my portable player etc. then people would give them money.
Instead - the music industry makes expensive stuff thats increasingly inconvienient and wonders why people are going elsewhere for their music. Oh and they don't pay the artists properly either - just in case we weren't pissed at them enough.
the mind boggles....
Yet another way to get WMA spread across our computers. Can't they classify this automatic installation of software as a worm? What if we don't want to compromise our computers with this? Then we could claim they are discriminating against us against infecting our own computers.
I hate this term. This music is not secure. It is restricted.
I'll have to install Wine just to get my CD to not work.
Its just a shame that all this technology will be beaten by simply swapping the sessions. Just have your multi session drive read the session with the audio tracks instead of the one with the wma. If their "encryptions" prevents use of ripping digitally, it can still be ripped analog style, which means it can still be turned into mp3 and ogg/vorbis very easily. Why don't they just stop. With all the money invested in trying to build a better lock, they could have changed buisness models numerous times.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
Hey, at least it will play on the majority of people's computers. My windows box IS my stereo, and not being able to play such CDs I own as the new Radiohead album is a tough pill to swallow. I much prefer this method of copy protection to the old "computer are bad" approach.
...anti-swap by virtue of it's content (with or without copy-protection)?
Tim
Raido shack has a patch for this however.
It really makes me wonder why recording studios spend millions of dollars researching these things when all it takes is one person to post this to kazaa and defeat the whole purpose of the encryption.
I guess this is why I am a CS major and not a business one.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
"What a shame that I'm running Linux"
/. don't like Linux either
Yeah, you're among friends here. Most people who read
and my portable MP3 player doesn't support WMA
Bummer...somehow, I also thought MP3s and WMA files were the exact same thing. You mean they are different formats and your MP3 player won't play WMAs?!
Bastards!
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
If you buy this and the place you buy it from specifies or implies that it is a CD, return it. They are required by law (at least in Canada and in the U.S.) to accept it for a full refund.
My brother just bought David Usher's latest album. It played in the car but not in his laptop and that's where he spends most of his time listening to music. Note that his laptop met all the requirements listed on the back cover, it just wouldn't play... no CD audio, no WMA, nothing. And of course, it would prevent him from transferring the music to an iPod if it would play only WMA. He took the thing back to Music World. We wrote complaints to EMI Music, Music World, and David Usher's management company saying he didn't appreciate being assumed to be a music pirate, he didn't appreciate misleading notifications on the album cover (stating that it would work in his computer), and that he did not appreciate having his Fair Use rights curtailed.
There was no response, of course, despite claims by at least one company that they would respond within x business days.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
High-end CD players and car CD players likely will not be able to handle it. Car CD players use a shock buffer which requires a true "random access" for reading ahead fast. The "encryption" usually consists of faulty bits on the CD, which results in read errors. Car CD players and high-end players try to correct for this, which does not work because there is no "true" faulty bit (which may be readable in some of the passes), but the CD is intentionally made as a faulty product!
The best thing you can do is to return the CD unopened. This way, the recall figures in the sales will go up, and even 60-year-old executives with business plans from the fifties will learn.
We'll never know since we can't download his stuff to sample it. Who cares!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
one set of "encrypted" songs that can be handled by CD players but cannot be ripped
I don't see how this is possible given current CD player technology. If the CD player can read the stream of bits off the CD, and turn it seamlessly into music, then my computer (which is much more sophisticated than my CD player) should also be able to do so.
Bits is bits. "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/rip-cd" will transfer those bits. My choice of friendly utility that translates CD-format music bits into mp3, or ogg, or whatever should then work on those bits.
Am I missing something?
Doesn't it still have to comply with ISO/IEC 60908 to have the CD Digital Audio logo on it? Shouldn't any CD player - hardware or software - on a non-drm-loving OS that plays media of this standard still be able to play/rip it?
i probably don't know enough about the standard or software cd players (that actually buffer the audio)
I have never understood why companies want their CDs to only play on CD players and not on PCs. If all CDs couldn't be played on PC, but could be played on CD players, people would just rip them the old fasion way... 1x analog/optical ripping. So, if we can copy the music no matter what they do, why do they do it?
You talk better than you fool!
Hmm, so I suppose running the speaker out back through to the line-in of the sound card and pressing 'record' in any sound recording program would be... too... tough... >_>
*looks around in a frenzy* _
By definition, if a track is encrypted, and must be decrypted in order to be played. The question is, how can it be encrypted if the CD players already on the market can play it, considering that they don't have any decryption functionality...
#define DRM chmod 000
mark do you think you'll have to make with a Sharpie this time?
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Seriously, you don't even need to be a "determined hacker" to get music off a somewhat-CD-compatible disc. Play the thing in your Discman, but instead of using headphones, just plug it into the line-in on your computer. Record it there.
Hell, you could plug it into your tape deck and record to cassette tapes. Or to your VCR and tape it on VHS. Don't know why you'd want to, but it's plenty easy.
When given the choice of buying a CD, or screwing over the bastard record companies who pull crap like this...I'm sure there's plenty who would sacrifice a small amount of quality for a "free" MP3 file.
The record execs have smoked it all.
"... songs that can be handled by CD players but cannot be ripped... "
If it can be played through speakers on a computer the audio can be ripped somehow, and this will always be the case. This is regardless of whether one is ripping the track directly from the cd or ripping the audio as the sound card plays it.
- - Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand. - -
It may use the compact disc format, but it's not a Digital Audio Compact Disc.
If they are going to sell a crippled disc it had better be marked as such. If I am lead to believe I am buying a disc recorded using the Red Book standard, that's damned well what I'd better get.
You can't sell a Honda Civic as a Porsche 911.
If the distinction is clearly marked on the disc, and that this disc does not conform to the Red Book standard and thus may not be 100% compatible with Red Book readers, then fine. I can make my decision to purchase or not to purchase.
NOT labling the CD as crippled/containing copy protection/etc and selling it along side Red Book discs is misrepresentation. Fraud, pure and simple.
(well, it my books anyway. Obviously the RIAA may feel differently).
Blockwars: new features including accounts, still multiplayer & free.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
If it doesn't meet the Philips spec for a CD, then it can't be called a CD. Has anyone actually seen this disc yet? I sincerely hope it doesn't carry the CD logo, since that would be a breach of the license
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
one set of "encrypted" songs that can be handled by CD players but cannot be ripped
/dev/dsp -> lame
CD -> CD player -> sound card ->
No track is unrippable. Provided your audio chain is somewhat decent, the quality loss will be inaudible (much less than from the MP3 encoding anyway).
In CD players, the disc plays normally (in theory)
Yes, "in theory" is the keyword. In practice, it is quite different. Anyhow, if enough of those silly copy-protected CDs come out, some CDROM manufacturers will start selling units that can read them at a higher price. Who's the loser in all cases? the consumer/listener.
When put into a computer, the disc installs software to keep the music secure
Does it work under Wine?
portable MP3 player doesn't support WMA.
Get a Rio Volt. Or even better, play the MP3s generated with the method above.
I hope more and more of these CDs come out, so more and more lawsuits against the idiots who make them happen, and eventually the entire music industry gets its reputation even more tarnished than it already is, hastening its long-overdue demise.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Got 'Hail to the Thief' today
It's the first 'Copy Controlled' disc I've ever got, and it's quite interesting how they've worked it.
The disc, ISO Buster tells me, is written in two sessions. Session 1, has the tracks, Session 2 has the software.
When I put it in the CD-RW drive, and open it's contents, all that shows up is the software "Player.exe" and it's associated files.
Windows Media Player refuses to recognise that the disc has any music tracks. As does Quick Time.
Winamp (2) when instructed to play the disc in my CD Drive, plays it, without problem. The Creative 'Play Center' that came with my soundcard is able to play it also.
The 'Player.exe' on the disc, insists on "modifying files" on my computer. It also then plays crippled versions of the songs, at only 96Kbps. Winamp and Play Center, play the tracks at full quality.
My CD Ripping software (and Creative's Play Center software) have no problem ripping the tracks to WAV, MP3, or whatever.
When I tried the disc in my DVD-Rom drive, it made grinding sounds, crashed my PC, and I had to reboot.
So, it's called a 'Copy Controlled' disc, but what it really is, is a 'Windows Media Player Blinding, DVD-Rom Drive Fscking, Otherwise Rip It And Share-Away As Normal' Disc.
What a complete waste of time for them.
Still, on the bright side, the record company is paying good money (or it's ill-gotten gains, depending on how you look at it) to license the "copy protection," er... system, and it's associated software. Which means less money for them, and the RIAA! Hurrah!
Silly tossers.
"New Anti-Swap CD's Hit Shelves"
and thats where they will probably stay....
EMI has been releasing high profile discs from artists like Radiohead, Jane's Addiction and Blur in Canada for a while now. The problem is that these high profile discs do not play in many conventional players, such as my 1-year old Sony Discman.
I wrote a nasty email to EMI about it, and they replaced my Radiohead disc free of charge with a non-crippled version, including delivery. I suggest that everyone who's against this technology actually buy the CD, write a letter to them and have them send a second disc at their expense.
Here's an open letter I wrote to EMI and the RIAA
and here's an entry about a technology I found to circumvent it. It can be done with software:
How to Rip these tracks
My biggest objection with this technology is that they call them CDs, when they don't conform to the CD standard. If you look for the official Compact Disc Constortium logo, it's missing. Putting these crippled discs alongside regular CDs in a store is misleading. They should be in a seperate section of the store, in very clear packaging (a small sticker or bullet on the back of the CD isn't obvious enough)
I also don't think the artists know what's happening to their work. People who play these CDs in computers receive a far lower quality version of the song than they'd even get by downloading them online. They can't say that they're "all about the art" and release crap like this which sounds hissy and loses the bass-line.
The WMA files are ripped at very low bitrates, something like 96kpbs, presumably to prevent people from just extracting them off the data layer and using file sharing. I personally never rip anything less than 192kpbs.
-RW
What is even worse is that WMA seems to be coming near the bottom of most listening tests. Restrictions or not, it's a bad format. Why couldn't they have used AAC? It can be restricted just as easily!
Right. Encrypted redbook audio. I don't recall my cd player(s) having a Clipper chip folks! Hardly even much of a CPU. More like a PIC controller, I think.
...from installing some what... new CD ROM-drive drivers? How exactly does this stop you from reading the audio tracks?
... sorry, I mean, "use the media I purchased in any way I wish for my personal use"? (What makes you think I'm an Amerikan, folks? Different rules here, thanks.)
So the reality of this is...
It's a CD that can only hold maybe 3/4 the amount of music CD's were designed to hold, and anything you want to snatch from the SPDIF jack on the back of your CD player can happily be recorded to... oh, say another CD (digitally, with all the original bits intact save for jitter), or Minidisc, or MP3 player, or whatever.
And when you play it on your PC, you can hold down the Shift key as you close the CD drawer to prevent Windows' Autoplay feature... Oh, wait, that is *if* you use Windows,
Now, more importantly. Labelling. Am I being *told* that I'm buying a CD that breaks my "God given right to steal music?"
Right.... Another half-assed attempt. If the music industry wanted to put some *real* effort in this, they'd simply work encryption (better than CSS!) into SACD's, and Sony would flood the market with cheap SACD players and re-release their whole catalogue on SACD, then stop pressing CDs.
Or, of course, they could price CDs reasonably so we'd go out and buy shitloads more, regardless of the fact that there's only one track half-worth listening to amongst all the made-for-radio/lowest-common-denominator garbage.
mindslip.
Unless they can encrypt the audio up to the point that it enters the ears, it can be ripped with a soudn capture card or d/a io. Any of these schemes just causes a speed bump for creating mp3s and hurts the music industry by causing incompatible media.
Just make MP3s easier to buy. I'm more than happy supporting the artists!
Rich
...they will do this to a CD with music I'm actually interested in hearing.
Actually, on second thought, they probably won't.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Why can't they just stop trying so hard to piss people off. If they'd stop trying to teach people, perhaps fewer prospective customers, like myself, would run, crying bloody murder.
I don't care to steal music-I've got the music I want (or if I want something new, I buy it/download it from iTMS). However, once I own it, I want to be able to listen to it on my terms. Why would I purchase music if I'm not getting anything better/more convenient and have to buy new equipment to listen to the music besides.
I just don't get it... I have a Mac here at home and with multi-session CD's it mounts both sessions as different CD's on the desktop... when I bring the same CD to work and try to play it on my Windows 2000 box it asks if I want to install all kinds of junk to play the CD. I can't listen to the CD with WinAmp at all like I can with any other normal CD...
So I have to download it (usually via IRC) and store a copy on my computer at work just so I can conveniently listen to a CD I bought... I wonder how much this brings up the RIAA's numbers of illegally downloaded songs... for instance if I didn't know all that much about computers and I was downloading songs I legitimately should be able to make MP3's out of and now Kazaa downloads them into a shared folder... well now the RIAA has 10-15 tracks more that they can claim are being widespread because I just wanted to listen to music I had given them money for.
Drop the CD in your OS X machine, and rip the "Audio CD" mounted image... Just ignore the other one.... Tested and confirmed.
If it doesn't meet the Red Book/Blue Book standards, it is not a CD, and Phillips should sue them if the use the Compact Disc Audio logo anywhere on the product. Also, CD retailers should refuse to carry them, as they WILL be returned much more often as purchasers discover they simply don't work with their hardware. We can also help out by buying, opening, then immediately returning one every time we get a chance! What are the chances of these working properly with Sony's car MP3 players?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The owner of the trademark is Philips, not Pioneer. They get to decide who can use the CD logo, and who can call something a "Compact Disc."
Philips has already threatened to sue companies that release such discs and label them as CDs. Philips is rightly worried that such incompatible discs (which often refuse to play correctly on some high-end and some consumer level players) will dilute the Compact Disc trademark, or worse, harm it substantially. Philips' position, which I support, is that a CD must conform to the Red Book standard for audio Compact Discs. Anything else isn't a CD.
...it's an anti-piracy circumvention device!
Seriously. According to the DMCA, couldn't use of that cable to rip one of these copy protected CDs be construed as such?
Just goes to show how convoluted and idiotic the logic behind these new laws has become.
Anthony Hamilton is apparently (more likely his producer is) not very knowledgable about all his record and distribution deals. He is featured on the iTunes Music store, where his MP3's can be downloaded burned and shared, obviously giving a chance for thoose of you wiht iPods, because the iTunes store is supposed to come out with a windows port soon. The true irony in this is that his "Anti-Swap" CD is selling on amazon.com for $10.99, while the entire cd can be bought on iTunes for $9.99
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
Just rip the individual tracks to WAV as per usual (as it usually works in 'nix wherein certain mechanisms in winblows attempt to thwart this) then either convert to mp3 or ogg... less quality lost than using a lossy WMA file (which was probably DRM'ed=unreadable anyhow)
Kicking unrepentant companies in the wallet is one thing, but further humiliating them by publicly putting them lower on the totem pole than companies who repent from Restricted CD's, is even more effective.
You've actually done us a public service by pointing out these reformed souls.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
One copy protected Compact Disk, no CDDA spec $14.95
One Forgiving CD player or resonable quality $105.99
One Stero RCA to mini stero patch cord $2.95
Not haveing to listen to shitty 128kbps WMA rips priceless.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Its just a shame that all this technology will be beaten by simply swapping the sessions
I've posted this before, and no doubt I'll post it again...
Rip your CDs to an ISO with CDRWin or BlindRead, with C2 error correction disabled (but leave jitter correction turned on). Then mount the disk image via Daemon Tools or the like, and use any normal CD audio ripper (in its fastest mode, since no errors or jitter can occur this way) such as CDex to extract the audio tracks from the virtual drive.
Works on every "defective" CD on the market, gives a perfect rip every time (for which reason I even use this method to rip non-defective CDs), and in many cases, it even takes less total time than using the CD audio ripper (assuming a non-defective CD) directly on the physical CD.
You'll only have a problem if your drive doesn't support turning off C2 correction, in which case, spring the fifty bucks to get a cheap older Plextor drive from Blindwrite's "supported drives" list.
Disclaimer - I have never even heard of the artist mentioned in the FP, and haven't tried this method on that particular CD. As I said, though, I have yet to fail to rip a CD this way, and have little doubt it would work in this case as well (sounds like just another cheesy multi-session standards violation hack, with the added "bonus" of running a trojan on your machine if you have unwisely left autorun turned on).
That should stop the 6 people that actually listen to his music.
I got a photo cd from my mother years ago. It installed Wal-Mart software that caused a system crash. The photo envelope had a small EULA that I did not read. It pays to hide in a small hole in your yard.
And it rendered on, until the end of its days.
Imagine how cool you will look during break if you have a Linux box.
But does that make Linux and/or VMWARE a tool for circumventing copy protection? And thus illegal under DMCA? Reminds me of the time when Microsoft was insinuating that selling a PC without a copy of Windows amounted to piracy.
When are people going to realize that this protection of music isn't going to be successful. Anyone with a full duplex sound card could connect audio in to audio out and record/encode mp3, regardless of any of these technologies they develop to prevent it. Companies are wasting their time and need to come to grips with the situation they have. Record companies have been ripping off their artists and the people buying CDs for a decade, its an inevitable revolution that they got the ball rolling on to begin with. If the product was worth $17, people would pay it continually, when in fact its not. A cd buy a great talent and a cd buy a market created one-hit wonder cost the same. People buy the cd by the great talent if they find it for a good deal and download/delete the one-hit wonders song. I think if the industry had less cookie cutter, less marketing, less bull shit, less bloat in the price and product, they'd have fewer problems with people ripping them off in return.
"These guys make rednecks look like models of common sense" -- Blaede (on Slashdot) referring to "l337 hackers"
What drives me completely mad is, the promise of the compact disc was high resiliance against dust and scratches, thanks to special coding mechanisms that utilize rendundant information in the CD blocks.
Well, these bastards now are using this area of the CD to make it un-rippable. And at the same time, they make it much less resiliant. In other words, they are selling CRAP which will have to be thrown away much sooner. The saddest thing is, 99% of the people will just go on and buy more CDs because of this. Yeah, maybe some of them will comment that "I htought CDs lasted longer, in the past", and will be promptly ridiculed by some smartass with "sure, and LPs were even better than that, riiight...".
And once again, the ignorant and meek consumer is lead like sheep to the slaughter.
Sigged!
"You loose a little quality" - understatement of the week. The .wma files are compressed at 96 kbps, and your little procedure will degrade the quality even further.
This being Slashdot, I guess your post was modded up because it mentions Linux. Otherwise, it's an engineering shame.
Sigged!
This is still true, for the time being.
Unfortunately, Microsoft and the music industry are already taking steps to prevent this from happening in the future.
I've been reading the comments posted so far, and have found that a large majority are quite negative. But mostly, it's negative in regards to the following:
1) Modifying the way the CD works will make it unplayable in certain players
2) Some people don't use WMA, either because they can't, or because they refuse.
3) The general "RIAA" sucks comments.
4) Other issues I didn't notice, cuz I'm too slow and lazy to list them all.
However, I didn't see anything come up that really pointed to whether this idea was sound in general. i.e. They're trying SOMETHING other than just suing the crap out of their customers, it appears that they're trying to both appease the consumer AND keep their margins up. After all, they ARE allowing personal copying and use, including sending a free copy to your friends for ten days. I'm sure the intention was NOT to make it not work on certain players or regions.
In my humble opinion, this seems like a step in the right direction. Now, that doesn't mean they should not continue to take further baby steps, and try harder to really get at what their consumers want, which is very low cost single track downloadable and convertable music in an easy to find manner.
Anyone else feel the same way? I'm not looking for flames here, and if what I said was inflammatory to you, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to point out my differing opinion from the majority of slashdot readers.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
actually they removed from it from
:o(
.exe with a nice virus.
win2000 and winXp.
You cannot do it on a "modern" windows without
messing with the registry (and you must know
where to change it, explain it to your mom!)
It a standard complain,
and that's why there is 3rd party
tool to do it.
Sad
BTW: I friend of mine wiped it's partition
table by inserting a "music" CD from someone else.
The second session had a
Moral: never ever keep this stupid autorun
*mis*feature.
my 2 cent
... that they will probably sell more CD's to people who want to figure out how to break the protection than to people who actually want to buy the CD for the music.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
What is the music industry thinking? They seem to think people want a perfect copy of their CD. Logically, that would assume that MP3 swappers are audiophiles. BUT all anyone really seems to want is sound quality roughly on par with FM radio play. To get that you don't even have to pump CD 'line out' to your PC. You can mike it from your stereo in to your PC thus circumventing any encryption scheme that doesn't actually deny you the ability to play it on your CD player. So just what exactly is the copy protection against? (I once thought it was to protect from the big pirating cartels in the Far East. But they are rich enough to hire full time encryption crackers or, more likely, steal master recordings.) Oh well, someone is making a buck selling these encryption schemes and the impact on the file swappers is neglible so carry on with life.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I thought I'd do something more then my usual support independent (or independently minded) artist. There are a ton of artists out there not caught up in the whole piracy debate (since the rise of the net WAY more then most people imagine). CD's at the mall are no longer safe. The industry/distribution giants that have been hand feeding us are no longer (where they ever?) interested in fair practices.
But this isn't really that big a deal, because you can just type your way down to:
mp3.com
or
emusic.com
or
umbrellamusic.com
or
listen.com
or
mp3it.com
or
iuma.com
or
grageband.com
or
besonic.com
or
zebox.com
And it just keeps getting bigger and better out there. Really the only thing that needs to happen is we need to get comfortable with buying online artists. Maybe Rolling Stone will do an online section? *shrug*
Quack, quack.
I hope this doesn't have the "Digital Audio" logo on it, which would incorrectly imply that this is in fact an Audio CD. Such discs violate Philips' RedBook (Audio CD) format
If you buy a CD and discover some sort of idiotic copy protection on it, return it to your vendor as DEFECTIVE. If the product claims to be an Audio CD and has copy protection in the form of encryption, unreadable tracks, etc. it is violating the specification and is defective.
Either that, or false advertising. Either way it's grounds for making a complaint and getting your money back (I have done this at Future Shop, had to see the Manager).
people will buy this cd simply because it wants to be cracked. Immagin such a scam - our cd comes with the latest anti-ripping technology! this would increase the purchase of any cd by bad artists because all the crackers want a piece of the so called "state-of-the-art" technologies!
You are confusing me with someone who cares.