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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."
Don't buy it.
Where there's a will, there's a way!
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.
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.
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.
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."
No doubt the software on the CD is written for Windows, so Linux will be unaffected - to Linux the CD will look like a mixed mode CD and it will be simple to rip the audio tracks. The only thing stopping Windows users from doing it is the little .exe that is started by the autorun "feature".
"... 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.
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.
:%s/encrypted/corrupted/g
Seriously, they might call it encryption or some shit like it, but it's just really well-placed (or poorly-placed, depending on whose side you're on) corruption. If they were encrypted, normal CD players wouldn't read the disc (and I'll bet some won't anyway because of the corruption). They're trying to rely in the fact that some audio CD players will be more tolerant than CD-ROM devices. However, that's not certain. Either don't buy this kind of garbage, or make sure you return it after buying it to prove a point (it is defective).
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Drop the CD in your OS X machine, and rip the "Audio CD" mounted image... Just ignore the other one.... Tested and confirmed.
Or just hold down Shift when you pop the CD into the drive...
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
You do realize that the industry is under no obligation whatsoever to package the music in the format you want, nor to make ripping mp3s easy.
You are correct, but in the same vein, I am under no obligation to give money to the music industry unless they give me a good quality recording both technically (sound quality) and artisticly (more than 1 or 2 good tracks per CD) in the format I want/need at a price I deem resonable and worthwhile. Otherwise, I keep my money and spend it on other forms of entertainment.
-Ab
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
Well, the headline says its a "CD" but if it doesn't play in a regular CD player it's not CD as far as the Red Book standard is concerned. Last I heard, Philips were pretty pissed about their standard being abused without clear warnings on the box. The article doesn't make this clear (no surprise, really).
So...is this a CD?
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).
The judge determined that Philips' trying to read a non-CD with a CD unit was a violation of the DMCA.
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