I just ran out on my lunch break to the local Fry's and picked up "More Fast And Furious: Music From And Inspired By The Motion Picture The Fast And The Furious" due to all the press it has been receiving because it's the first 'copy protected' CD from a major record label(Not to mention I love the movie!). Put the CD in my computer, fired up Audiograbber, pressed 'Grab' and it locked up the program. I had to give AG the three finger salute(Ctrl-Alt-Del), end the task, and relaunch it. Turns out Universal paid some genius a lot of $$$ to fudge up the start index on the first song(It was -3728:16). So I went in and set the start time to "0" on the first track and Ta-Da, it works! Gee, what a cracker I am! It took me all of 2 minutes, including restarting AG, to 'unprotect' the CD. So, the moral of this post is: Feel free to go out and buy the album, you will be able to rip it and listen to it on our favorite digital music player. The only thing I am debating right now is if I want to go through all the trouble of returning it in protest... As a side note, the CD has a 'Compact Disc Digital Audio' Logo on it, which according to this site(it is the first logo, at the top) means it conforms to the Red Book standard. I wonder if the standard states that you can specify an invalid start time?

This is very very cool. Thanks for this post.

The only thing I am debating right now is if I want to go through all the trouble of returning it in protest... As a side note, the CD has a 'Compact Disc Digital Audio' Logo on it...

By all means do go and return the thing. As I keep saying, somebody should sue them for false advertising, misrepresentation, abuse of trade marks, whatever (preferably in a class action suit )

/me runs out to Best Buy #1 and #2 right now to begin the buy and return protest.

Sure it's an easy workaround, but it shouldn't be needed in the first place. We need to prove that to them.

So I went in and set the start time to "0" on the first track and Ta-Da, it works!

Just as a reminder to everyone out there with voting rights in the United States, you should write to your lawmakers if you want the DMCA changed so that making that statement is not technically illegal.

Peter

Me confused....Which start time are you referring to?...I'm just an Audiograbber amateur....

Thanks much,
Wes

He just circumvented a protection technology, so he's a criminal per the DMCA.

Right-click a track you're about to rip in 'grabber, then select the Track Properties option from the popup menu, then look at the Track Properties tab... You have start and stop times in minutes & seconds as well as in disk sectors.

You can change these if for instance you want to rip the entire disk to one track - deselect all but one track, set the start time to start time of track one (normally 0) and the stop time to the stop time of the last track.

/Michael

Be careful. Your posting here could be construed as a "circumvention device." Maybe you, too, can get a nifty letter from Matt Openheim at the RIAA.

(FWIW, there may be some news, soon, from the Rice/Princeton SDMI-breaking crew. Stay tuned...)

Be careful. Your posting here could be construed as a "circumvention device." Maybe you, too, can get a nifty letter from Matt Openheim at the RIAA.

So? He has a legal right to listen to the music he purchased with his Almighty American Dollars. They are selling CD's that don't play on devices which are sold based on their ability to play consumer audio. IANAL, but I believe that the suits at the RIAA can write whatever they want, but the law is on the consumer's side in this case. DeCSS ridiculousness notwithstanding. I think the RIAA is just sore that the AHRA has so many loopholes which favor the consumer. "Seemed like a good idea at the time, huh, suckers?"

Heh, I doubt that the DMCA (did I get the letters in the proper order?) is in effect here in Sweden - though it would be nice to be able to visit the US sometime... However, my post just showed how to rip the full CD as one track - I didn't point out that the start sector of the first track on some "copy prevention protected" CDs is deliberately set wrong. Ooops, guess I did it now! If anyone is in trouble, I suppose it would be the authors of Audiograbber and other similar tools, for providing the capability...

/Michael

He has a legal right to listen to the music he purchased with his Almighty American Dollars.

"Pathetically Weak Swedish Kronor" actually
To the best of my knowledge (everythings ripped fine so far) I haven't bought any copy protected CD yet.

/Michael

"Pathetically Weak Swedish Kronor" actually

Ahh... I thought he was replying to the guy who started the thread. Well in case you missed it, the dollar isn't so almighty these days anyway. No wonder these greedy record companies are trying to squeeze every penny they can out of the consumer.

To the best of my knowledge (everythings ripped fine so far) I haven't bought any copy protected CD yet.

Yeah me neither, and I don't expect them to catch on. Know why? EVERY magazine I've read that has a "holiday gifts" section has had some kind of MP3 player. Some have the Nomad jukebox model, some have the Rio Receiver, some have those MP3 enabled cell phones, or the Apple iPod... People are buying these products. A LOT of people I'd imagine. Now that MP3 is mainstream, the record companies will get a very negative consumer backlash if these CD's don't rip into MP3 properly for all these people who bought MP3 hardware.

The record industry needs to start embracing digital distribution, and fast.

To further drive home my point about the RIAA not standing a chance, here's a Slashdot story from today. Those are some pretty big names in music today, I think the labels are going to have to stop biting the hands that feed them...

From what I remember of the Red Book, it's not so much what it does specify, but what it doesn't, unfortunately. A lot of the things can be done to the disks without them apparently contravening the standard - the trick is in implmenting the fudges without it directly affecting playback (or maybe in some cases, with it affecting playback, quite deliberately! ). We used to embed test tracks and all sorts on many pressings, including (most famously) the one that lauched CD as a standard, "Brothers in Arms". If you know where to look on an original early pressing of this CD, you might get a few surprises - I wonder why there are only a few tracks on that CD?

A lot of the later stuff (high density, and so forth) that got put out as enhanced disks usually were taking advantage of slopiness in the spec - for example, there is no physical boundary on an audio track, as long as it terminates with a logical symbol as an end of track marker. So if your player is capabable of tracking far enough out, what's to stop a track going over what used to be the physical boundary normally imposed by the reliability of the production processing at the edge of the disk? If your sputtering deposition process is uniform right out to the edge of the disk with no degradation, then you have more room for a track to extend out the disk to 80 odd minutes and there is nothing to stop a well-designed CD head from going out that far.

The reason the original CD-A disks got pegged at 74 minutes was because the early disk production equipment couldn't reliably deposit the reflective material beyond about 3 mm from the outer edges of the disk. This meant that as you got into the "Dead Band" at the edge of the disk, the symbol error rate from the decoder reading the data stream skyrocketed. So Philips and Sony simply designed their production stampers (that got sold to the people producing CDs) to always stamp inside the reliable deposition radius of the disks, giving a practical recording time limit of 74 minutes! This ensured that their QA were happy with the playback quality all across the disk surface and that the number of disks with "Defective last tracks" was minimal. Public perception of the product never suffered as a result, and the rest is history.

I must dig out my old (and very dog-eared) copy sometime....

We used to embed test tracks and all sorts on many pressings, including (most famously) the one that lauched CD as a standard, "Brothers in Arms".

Wow, yeah, that was one of the very first CDs I bought when I got my first CD player. I never knew it was considered such a benchmark, but I remember being blown away by its sound and production. What a fantastic album.

So what should I be looking for on my copy of Brothers in Arms?

Ha haaaa!

I should say, that a lot of money was spent in order to get Dire Straits to go over to CD (Bribes? How dare you use such language!) and the production expenditure was reputed to have been similar to the money spent on an Aegis missile destroyer. Not for nothing was that a beautiful sounding disk, with songs that they have never since surpassed. It couldn't possibly have failed in the market place, there was far too much riding on it. I can even remember it being the "Standard Demo" album to show what CD players could do at the local record shops over here for years afterwards.

Hey. Just looked at your Universal CD return report, and I was wondering if you could post an image of the sticker that guarantees returns. You see, I'm too lazy to get off my butt and find one myself, so I was hoping someone could do it for me.

Head to http://www.perilith.com/~drakino/cd/cd1.html for images of the packaging and such.

Nice work indeed!!!
I can't think of any way to send the message better. "legally, that is..."

Hm, two things to note:

- If I see correctly, they still have a CD-DA logo on the CD. Sticker or no sticker, this is misrepresentation.
- If they wrote a Win program to play broken CDs, somebody else will, too (first to play, then to rip); ergo, the whole excercise is pointless, as everybody with a grain of salt is claiming all the time.

It would be interesting to know whether S|B has, ahem, taken any measures to ameliorate the situation with these CDs in the context of autoripping on the -109.

I don't know if anyone has tried any copy-protected CDs on the HSX-109? Would be interesting to find out.

Well raise your hand if you have a HSX-109.

Anyone? Hmm....Tony?

Perhaps you should pick up a copy of that Fast and Furious disc and see if it works on your Jupe.

Ew, that would mean I'd actually have to walk into a record store. Ick.

I liked reading this discussion
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2001/12/18/dont_steal_music/index.html.

It hints at why the recording industry isn't really doing much yet to stop MP3s.
Check it out.

If I see correctly, they still have a CD-DA logo on the CD. Sticker or no sticker, this is misrepresentation

Yep, thats the official logo on the CD, and it's also on the Jewel case in the typical places (Not that it matters too much there, since most of my games have that pn the case as well).

If they wrote a Win program to play broken CDs, somebody else will, too (first to play, then to rip)

That windows program I show is playing the yucca.cds file, and not the audio tracks on the CD.

It states (correctly) that technological 'battle against piracy' is by definition lost. However, it also implies (incorectly) that all MP3 equipment (they mention Apple's) ends up full of 'napstered' music. I am sick of that.

To be fair, I have about 250 downloaded tracks on my player. But I have nearly 5700 that are ripped from my own CDs. The downloaded tracks are mostly for testing and nostalgic purposes. A lot of things that I do intend to buy and a lot of stuff that I still have no clue where I'll be able to buy.

I've got some Trans X, Nu Shooz, Debbie Deb, Cake, Hooverphonic, Altered Images, Kraftwerk, Mr.Oizo, etc. Now, Cake, Hooverphonic and Kraftwerk won't be a problem for me to find full-length albums and buy. The others?

The RIAA can kiss my ass. The *last* thing they're about are the artists. Besides, if I had to give up one nation's music, the USA (sorry) would be one of the easiest.

Bruno

I am not religious about copyright, either: I have prehaps 50 downloaded tracks (few of them to see what the heck is this or that artist about before buying, the rest the things I could absolutely not find - perhaps I would have had more were it not for my slow connection), plus several hunderd tracks 'shared' with friends (most of which I am slowly replacing with my own rips). I also own more than 800 CDs, burlgars took some 200 CDs, and my brother decided he will take good care of my vinyls - in other words, I feel that record companies received pretty penny from me - for some records three times. I believe most of out members are more or less like that - be it for scrupulous adherence to copyright laws or perfectionism, the vast majority of tracks on their empegs have been paid for.

I am affraid that boycotting US music is not an option, not only because I like Pete Seeger, Suzanne Vega, Walkabouts, R.E.M., J.J. Cale or John Coltrane, but because those 'big five' record companies that control RIAA are global entities. Besides, there is worrying trend in Europy of copycating recent American absurd 'intellectual property' laws.

"The RIAA can kiss my ass. The *last* thing they're about are the artists"


yeah, if it was about the Artists, or even about the "Music" we'd have better music out there. (sorry, thats my theroy in a nut shell)