EMI's Copy Control CDs

[erickoh 0]

Bought 2 Lisa Ono's CDs today... which had the label 'Copy Control CD' on it.

To my dismay, I found that the CD wouldnt play on my portable player (iRiver IMP)

It would skip after a few seconds of play on each track. I believe it is due to the

electronic skip protection on the player (the ESP feature cannot be switched off)

 

To get the CD to work on the PC, you will have to install and use their software

CD player application. Using any other player will result in clicks thoughout each track.

 

Needless to say, I'm quite pissed with it.. and will certainly avoid CDs with

'Copy Control' technology on them. To think that I bought these CDs and now I

have to crack the protection and burn it on another CD so I can listen to it...

makes me wonder why I didnt just download the tracks from kazaa

 

[Blues 0]

is that the same as avex trax's copy protected?

hm,..

[Sipher 0]

those CDs cannot be played on PCDPs??

how about normal CDPs?

[Firefox 0]

those CDs cannot be played on PCDPs??

how about normal CDPs?

They can be played on PCDP's as long as the players don't try and digitally rip the tracks. ie. use ESP.

[Sipher 0]

They can be played on PCDP's as long as the players don't try and digitally rip the tracks. ie. use ESP.

That's no good

[ablaze 0]

thanks for the warning Eric! are these discs rippable with EAC?

[Rameish 0]

The more people return the discs and ask for their money back the less we'll be pushed around.

[Wortel 0]

Thats just so lame. You need to crack it before your computer will read it huh?

 

I've never encountered any discs like that. Take it back and tell them off.

 

It's your disc you paid for the music what more do they want?

 

May as well download it.

[evil-zen 0]

well i'm not sure if you can return them since they did label that it is copy right protected. if you want to rip such cds, try CloneCD, rip as Audio CD, mount it using the virtual drive and extract using EAC. Worked for 1 of my cds but not the other.

[adhoc 0]

there are many sites out there that teach you how to get over this 'copy protection'

 

look carefully at your disc. can you see two distinct tracks? something like 2 distinct 'darker' areas? if so, the outer one is the copy protection track. you can IIRC use a marker or sticky tape to cover part of the outer track, this renders it unreadable and so the player will only pay attention to the inner audio track.

[Rameish 0]

Evil, my point exactly, copy protection should only function as copy protection and not render it unplayable in a PCDP (even with ESP switch on). Sometimes you have to pretend to be an average consumer.

 

Here's the logic:

 

If EMI starts getting returns on these and others then they will drop the idea hopfully.

[erickoh 0]

http://trinja.cryptek.org/robin/showBlog.p....php?BlogID=452

 

"EMI's Copy Control mechanism works by purposely introducing errors into the discs's physical surface, on the audio layer. The idea is that a standalone CD player will ignore the errors as it's playing, but a computer, which is far more sensitive to data integriy, will object to reading the audio portion of the data and will only be able to read a special data layer."

 

"a digital, low quality WMA versions of the songs in a hidden data layer, which you have to play using their proprietary jukebox program."

 

 

Tried to use EAC to rip the CD.. EAC reports no errors, but the clicks are present in the rip.

As mentioned in the article above, a hidden data portion is indeed present, which presumably

contains a wma version of the CD. I personally confirm that playing the CD using their software

player gives a sucky version of the songs.

 

 

 

 

[N@Z 0]

Let's all go back to vinyl!

[tee 0]

Sound very complicated.........i am a simple man.....just want music from simple sources like CDs or SACDs.

[evil-zen 0]

SACDs probably won't have such problems because it cant be played or ripped on a computer. Therefore companies won't bother to put copy right protection on it to prevent spreading via networks.