'Copy protected' - don't always believe the label

I bought the new album by the Darkness yesterday. After Glastonbury you just had to, right?

I bought it from my local small record shop (counter service) so it wasn't til I got it home that I saw the label. It said it was playable on most CD players. It is. It said that it could 'also be played on most CD-Rom drives, by means of the included compressed sound file'.

And so I thought I'd see what it meant.

I tried it in the Smart Disk VST CD-ROM/RW hooked up to my iMac DVSE first.

Three tracks showed up fine (the first three) and ripped fine in iTunes. The rest of the album was on one massive 4 GB file which wouldn't rip, in anything under 16 hours.

I tried it in the slot-loading iMac CD-ROM drive.

All the tracks showed up in iTunes and all except track 4 ripped fine. There was no sign of tracks 4-10 being one track only.

I tried it in the tray-loading CD/RW drive of my iBook 900. Eureka. It all showed up fine and it all ripped fine, too. Even track 4. And it ripped to MP3 and AIFF fine as well. And yes, I burned a CD, just to check out that that worked too. It did.

So the question is, do the CD protection bods ignore us Mac users because we're a) numerically insignificant and b) not the type of chap to steal music, or is the CD protection on this particular CD just not very good?

PS: When Kerrang said: "Bold brilliant and built to last. The Darkness are the greatest rock'n'roll band of the last twenty years" they were exaggerating. But not by much. This is an awesomely good record.

[Bob]

Pomp Rock is back eh?
I caught a brief snippet of them at Glastonbury and thought they were a breeze of fresh air in the stagnant pond that is music just now!

Re: CP CD's - I really want to get the Foo Fighters latest CD, but it has the CP warning on the back plus the little green circle computer icons which warn buyers that they are not suitable for use in PC's.
Call me stubborn, but on a matter of principle I won't buy these non music CD's, but would be interested if anyone has managed to rip "One by One" on a Mac.

[sn0ski]

One by One ripped fine on my Mac G4

[smerko]

ripped with me 2 on win 2k

[randydecker]

I bought Hail to the Thief and was disappointed to see the copy protected label on the back when I got home. I'm not sure if i would have bought it if I had noticed it when it was on the shelf. I copied it to my HD using iTunes no problem. Am I missing something? What exactly does "copy" mean?

[Bob]

randy,
Not sure if you have read these threads protected cd's and the future of MP3 ripping and Protected CD - not but it is a good place to start.

[randydecker]

MadPict, So I wonder why the CD says Copy Protected when it's not? Does it only work on some systems? I'm not complaining but like you It's a deterrent for me. I mean now if see the copy protected sticker I would be much less likely to buy a CD. Makes no sense to me for the distributors to make a product less attractive. I play all my music frm my HD or iPod and never use one of my 4 cd players. They're obsolete. CDs are a medium density storage/backup solution to me.

[Bob]

Well, all I can say really is that if I buy a CP CD by mistake and I can't rip from it I will take it back to the shop for a refund. My consumer rights will at least allow me that right in the UK.

It is not a music CD as defined by the co-creator of CD's, Philips (article)
"Philips, because of conformity issues, has warned the record labels that the discs are actually not CDs at all and must bear warning labels to inform consumers.
"We've made sure they would put a very clear warning that you're not buying a compact disc, but something different," Wirtz said. "We've been warning some labels to begin with, and they've adjusted their behavior."
That means labels would also be barred from using the familiar "compact disc" logo that has been stamped on every CD since Philips and Sony jointly developed the technology in 1978."

A list of current warning labels can be found here

[randydecker]

I can't believe the short sightedness of yhe RIAA. You'd think with the bloated salaries might come some semblence of intelligence.

[neo]

All:

The short of it is that most copy protection schemes rely on improper implementations of the music cd standards in cdrom firmware. When those are fixed up, (to my knowledge) no copy protection schemes work. This would make sense, since the original standards had no provisions for copy protection. I would guess that macs use better drives, thus better implementations of the standards.

I have attempted to rip several "copy protected" cds with my plextor drive, and it has always worked to date.

n

That makes some sense. Certainly the newer my hardware, the better it seems to ignore the protection.

Hurrah! Another reason to switch!!!

[Bob]

Disaster has struck the home of MadPict!

Mrs MadPict (bless her) has bought me 2 albums - Foo Fighters "One By One" and Kings of Leon "Youth and Young Manhood". I failed in my education of her in all things Copy Protection - "Its a CD isn't it? And you were looking at them the other day!"

Now, Foo Fighters ripped fine (well I just had to try it didn't I? ) but the Kings of Leon CD does not want to know in either Mac or PC.
In fact it doesn't like playing in the Sony Walkman CD player - every track skips at the 9 second point. Just a small stutter but it is there.
It plays OK on my hifi CD player, so do I keep this evil non-music BMG product. (I am tempted to keep it to see if I can thwart the CP by hook or by crook(ed) means, but my my principles are screaming at me right now).

The skipping thing at 9 secs is interesting, and I wonder if it is down to the CP?
It is enough for me to return it as defective, as it affects the playback, but there must be a way to get around this CP.

The front of the CD sleeve is white and just visible on the bottom left corner in a slightly darker shade of shiny white is this logo

[img=http://ukcdr.org/issues/cd/warnings/0-IFPI.png][/img]

- not at all prominent!! (Replace the black portion with the slightly off-white and that's how obvious it is!)

The rear does carry the BMG Cactus Control logo

[img=http://ukcdr.org/issues/cd/warnings/BMG-CDS200.jpg][/img]
but with the security frames used these days it is probably not really visible until the frame is removed.

Bearing in mind the popularity of the Kings of Leon and their album being hailed as the "Best debut album of the last ten years", I think there could be a lot of unhappy punters out there.

[Bob]

Follow up to the "9 second stutter" - have just read this over at Campaign for Digital Rights.

"Hail to the thief" by Radiohead: Reported corrupt in the Netherlands, Canada, Israel, Norway, Australia, Italy and the UK, and as supplied by CD-WOW and PLAY.com. The corrupt format is Cactus-200. This CD is reported to cause severe playback problems (sticking on tracks, failing to play, etc) on one tested CD player. Skips and stops are reported on a new Sony Discman, especially 10 seconds into the tracks. A laptop user reported that it sounded like the disc was trying to destroy his drive. Normal playback failed on a tested PC, but cdparanoia extracted the audio without problem. On another PC, winamp playback was possible for all but the last 3 tracks. Some PC drives completely fail to recognise the disc, but some others read it without problem. Extraction on one iMac failed 9 seconds into a track. The quality of audio from the special PC player app (when it works) is noticably poorer than CD-quality audio (36kbps WMA files!).

If you know anyone with a newer iBook (me if all else fails) then try ripping it on that. As I said, the Copy Protected Darkness album would not rip properly on my iMac DVSE, but rips fine on the iBook......

Also which version of iTunes are you trying to rip with?

[Bob]

iTunes 4.0.1 - it just sits in the tray churning away like an old toploading washer!

I put it into my PC and it prompted me to install software to access the CD - I'm not wanting to install anything that I have no control or knowledge of, so it will remain unplayed on my computers.

I have a USB Iomega zipCD 650 hooked up for burning from my PC, I may give that a go - this is all new to me so I guess I have to access the CD and find the audio files on it.