2 fingers up to Copy Control Audio CDs

2 fingers up to Copy Control Audio CDs Mar 29. 045

I recently bought an audio CD only to discover that because of the ‘copy control’ features on the disc, the CD refused to play on my ‘standard’ car CD player. To begin with I thought there was something wrong with the player.

However with a little research I have discovered the scam that record companies are trying to pull on us consumers, selling us on ‘corrupted’ discs designed not to play on computers and other non standard devices.

The irony of it all is that to get around this I just used a product called ‘CD-ex’ to rip the tracks off the CD as MP3, then burn them back to a new disc for playback in my car.

I think this really sucks, after all once I have purchased a CD it’s up to me how I want to use it, isn’t it? I don’t have a home CD player, I play audio through a ‘SLIMP3‘ which is networked to my PC, so being able to ‘record’ tracks that I have paid for so that I can listen to them in the manner which I wish is a requirement.

Tagged: Personal

There was a lot of contraversy when these came out. I think they are required by (US) law to put on the CD case if it’s a copy-protected CD or not. If it is, don’t buy it.

Additionally, supposedly some you could use a marker and mark around the edge of the CD (the corrupted data track), and it would play. No clue if it works on your CD, though.

Posted by JesterXL on 29/03/2004 at 12:44 PM

I’d suggest returning the original cd to the store and explain that it won’t play in your car cd player-therefore it is defective to you. These get returned to the label. Costs them money. There was a group that did this for a while buying a particular copy-protected cd in mass quantities, opening each, trying to play it on the computer, and when it failed- returning it.

Posted by eestes on 29/03/2004 at 12:44 PM

if you mean the program CDex then I’d suggest not ripping the CD to mp3 and then making a CD from those files. rip directly to WAV, make your CD, then use CDex to convert the WAVs to mp3/ogg/ape whatever you like. A CD sourced from MP3 files won’t sound as good as one sourced from WAV files. or better yet, get DB-PowerAmp and convert to SHN files. :)

Posted by matte on 29/03/2004 at 12:44 PM

Thanks Matte, guess I’m just lazy, but yes you are right, ripping to WAV would give me a much better quality recording. :)

Posted by Nathan Pitman on 29/03/2004 at 12:44 PM

I did something similar with Iso buster (i.e extracting the tracks of the cc disc as .wav files and burning as a â€˜properâ€™ cd before encoding the tracks as mp3). Thanks for the info that CD-ex can do it as well.

Posted by Niki on 29/03/2004 at 12:44 PM

hello, my name is
nathan pitman.