i bought David Bowie's new album Heathen today, and the damn thing won't work. the main menu comes up on my computer, but it won't play. my portable CD player doesn't recognize it everytime, and when i tried it on my Mac at work it locked the system up. stangely, i had no problem ripping the Disk to MP3 with "AudioGOGO" (which is a great Windows based ripper). pretty stupid that the only way i can listen to the CD is to "pirate" it. it is obviously going to go back to the store. i've bought CD+'s (this CD is sony's version called "CDExtra" in the past with no problem, so maybe there is somekind of (ineffectual) anti-pirating scheme preventing me from using it. the damn thing is made to play in computers, so it should play in computers. anyone else have bad experiences with these things? it's a good album, BTW, and it sounds great as 320 KBPS mp3's (it took me about 4 minutes to rip and encode).
Posted by Colorful Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Yep, that CD is copy-protected by an elaborate (ho, hum, cough, choke) mechanism, designed to prevent CD-ROM drives from reading the disc. Laughably however, it can be defeated with... a watermarker.
Cartman's first axiom: if you can listen to it, you can rip it.
Posted by EdipisReks (Member # 510) on :
double post, of some kind.
Posted by EdipisReks (Member # 510) on :
well, i couldn't listen to it, and i could still rip it. however, if it is made to not run in cd-roms, why does it have computer only content? with these, you just block out the ring that serves as a table of contents for the encryption, right? you can do it with tape, too.
Posted by Colorful Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Whoops, my bad. Mistook Bowie for Jagger.
Posted by EdipisReks (Member # 510) on :
ah.
Posted by Colorful Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Key2Audio is the protection scheme I was referring to, by the way.
Posted by MaGiC (Member # 59) on :
Prettyt much exactly the same thing happened to me with Darren Hayes' Album 'Spin' except its fine on a normal cd player. Can't view the pc only content...it simply won't run. Can't play the music tracks on my pc but could rip them with realjukjebox of all things!
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
The whole idea behind a lot of this copy protection stuff is that there is extra information on the CD that is ignored by audio CD drives. CD-ROM drives however interpret this as some kind of wibbly noise that mucks them up.
So putting PC only stuff on a CD designed NOT to work in a CD-ROM drive is pretty gosh darn crazy.
Posted by Vice-Admiral Michael T. Colorge (Member # 144) on :
Then why bother doing it at all? I remember when I bought an imported CD of White Lilies Island and it crashed my Area 51. I thought that my computer busted out but it turned out that CD had some copyright protection software. And that didn't even have any PC extras.
Posted by Magnus de Pym (Member # 239) on :
"an imported CD of White Lilies Island and it crashed my Area 51."
So that is what that "flying disk" was. Hm.
Posted by Vice-Admiral Michael T. Colorge (Member # 144) on :
![[Wink]](wink.gif)