I have a specific cd that EAC will absolutely not recognize. In other words, it doesn't even recognize that there's an audio disc in the drive. Actually, to be fair neither can Windows Media Player or MusicMatch.

The cd is Morcheeba's "Who Can You Trust". I bought it from a second hand store. It's got one of those For Promotional Use Only stickers on it, so I thought maybe it was a specially encrypted copy that they sent out to reviewers so they can't be copied or something. But it was released in '96, so I can't imagine that's it. Any ideas on why none of my software will recognize this disc? I've tried cleaning it. My cd-writer (a Plex 8/4/32) reads every other disc I have fine.

Have you tried with other CD drives and/or computers? Does it play OK on 'ordinary' CDDA player?

I've tried it in my car cd player and it works fine there. Haven't had a chance to try it any other computers, but I'll try that next. For what it's worth, when I first loaded this cd, my computer locked up. After that, my cd drive wouldn't recognize any audio cds. Then I did a reboot, and that did the trick for all the other cds I tried, but still not that one.

Record companies has actually been messing woth copy protection for CDs for years...they just never made it public until the MP3.com/Napster era got into full swing.

More likely however is that the CD is scratched. That can generate enough noise that computer CD drives can't read it, but "real" CD players can. Incidentally, that is the theory behind the copy protection scheme known as "Cactus".