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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.
Where there's a will, there's a way!
..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!
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!
I can crack any CD in two seconds. Just grab either side with both hands and bend it until it cracks. Works best with Brittney Spears and Backstreet Boys CDs. ;)
It's all fun and games until someone loses the key to the handcuffs.
"I think we can handle one little file swapper. I sent two units, they're bringing her down now"
"No lieutenant, your CD is already cracked."
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."
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. - -
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.
Am I missing something?
/. had the story and umpteen million other related artcles can be found in the older stories..
Yes, you are. When this technology first came out years ago
Anyway, to save you some trouble, the idea behind the "copy protection" is that they fudge the error correction on the disc's in such a way that a less complex (i.e. your home stereo cd player) will read them just fine and ignore the garbage and your more complex, cd-rom drive in your computer will barf attempting to use the error correction and be unable read the disc.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
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
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.
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.
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)
I would agree with this statement if the same content was available via alternative delivery mechanisms. It's one thing to impose a copy protection scheme on a particular method of content delivery, but it's quite another to do so when that's the only method of content delivery that's available.
Some on this thread have advocated just not buying the CD, but if I happen to really like the artist I have no alternative avenue for purchasing the content.
For me, the conflict is that the companies that have the interest in the content are the same as the ones doing the distribution. I'm all for record companies and artists making money, but I don't think they should be involved in the actual distribution of their product. When was the last time you walked up to a corner convenience store that was owned by the Coca Cola Company? Never. The content and the delivery are two distinct things, and it gets very messy and much more expensive for a single company to do both.
I think all the flap over copyright we've seen over the past few years would be solved if the record companies focused on the talent side of things -- acquiring, producing and recording artists and songs.
Once they have a finished product (albums and singles), they license the content to distribution companies who are free to distribute the albums and singles as they see fit. Some may choose to put the content on a CD and impose a copy protection scheme, and some may choose to make it available via digital download (perhaps with a different copy protection scheme in place).
The difference here is that the record companies have gone out of the distrubution business. Can you imagine going into your favorite record store and seeing the same CD but distributed from three or four different companies?
It's all about competition. The record companies don't care because they are earning a cut each time the song is distributed, no matter what form that distribution takes. The distribution companies want the markup on the actual sales of the disk, so they'll compete with each other to drive the price down so they can earn a piece of the sales.
I think this is a win-win situation for everyone involved, and perhaps on-balance will be about the same revenue stream for the record companies. Sure, they're giving up the sales of the CDs, but their content will be available in more venues.
The bottom line question: Is the content good enough to stand on its own, or is the real money where the sales are? Either way, let's turn the RIAA lawyers loose on coming up with a pen-and-paper content distribution model that allows the free market to operate. It'd be the first time this was done on pure content and not on actual physical products, but I think the model would hold quite well.
-anacron
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.