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.
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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.