Ok, I'm pissed. No, I'm mean I'm REALLY pissed, and I'm not talking drunk either!

Today I've bought a couple of cd's. One of them is called "Illusion Retro Classix 2", a compilation of retro classic trance hits as played in club Illusion (a Belgian nightclub)

I bought this CD, in spite of having practically 90% of it's contents already in my cd-collection. Why? Three reasons :
1) I buy EVERYTHING club Illusion realeases, so in a way I was completing my collection.
2) Let alone the fact that I already have practically all those tracks on CD, it's still a very, very, very good compilation. In fact, about 10 of the 22 featured tracks are on my list of all time favourites.
3) This CD only features the FULL VINYL cuts of the tracks. So I bought it to finally, after all these years, have full versions of some of my favourite tracks.

So the first thing I do when driving home from the CD-store is play the CD in my car. My dad's car actually. This car has a pioneer headunit about 4 years old. The first thing I notice that I find strange is that I'm not able to fast forward/rewind or skip tracks. The CD plays, but that's it. Mmmmm strange.
I get home and the first thing I want to do (naturally) is to get this CD onto my Empeg. I put the cd in my plextor 40x and it doesn't see any tracks. Strange. Let's try the Plextor 12x writer. Also nothing. Pioneer DVD Rom? Same! WTF????
So I check with Exact Audio Copy, which DOES see the tracks, only they're not .wav files, so it can't extract them.
Man, this sucks! I mean, I BOUGHT this Cd! If it weren't for the CD store having a "sorry, no refunds"-policy I'd return it in a heartbeat.
So now I'm stuck with a CD which only does not play in more than half the CD players I throw it at but even worse : it seems it can't be ripped.
Or can't it? Aren't there already some utilities on the net which can surpass this "protection?"

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

On an additional note : I can't believe distributors actually want to go ahead with these protections. Cause I can only tell you how I feel right now : cheated. I mean, I bought a product and I can't use it for what I intended it for. That s**ks! If they really want to go ahead and implement this crap in lots of CD's I can tell you there will be lots of unhappy customers!

you can return it reguardless of the stores policys and in fact i would encourage it

Check out this post.

Not sure if it will work on your CD, but it's worth a shot.

You may find that stores in the rest of the world don't subscribe to the American-Way(tm). It helps to know where the person is from. Archeon is in Belgium.

Bruno

how about contact the band and let them know a loyal listener can't hear their latest release due to their rotten label using "copy protected cd's"

Return it as a defect, it may noy be a copy protected CD. Most stores (here in the US anyhow) allow like for like returns if there is a defect. If the second one does it, then it's time to start complaining.

Thanks, I'll give that a shot, but I don't thing it will work since the CD drive seems te have a hard time recognising this is even a CD. It keeps on scanning.
Even Clony says it's a empty CD.

I would contact the band, but this is a compilation cd. Even worse, it's a retro-dance-compilation CD. So no bands are involved, only studio dance projects. Of which most only were a one-hit wonder (in clubs, not in the charts) about 7 - 10 years ago.
There's no way I'll be able to contact them, ot that they'll even care.

I would return it as defect, but I know the store where I got it from. I've dealt with them before. Their customer service absolutely sucks. They have a strict : "sold goods are non-refundable/tradable" policy, and it says so on a big sign above the exit. I only go there because they are 20% cheaper than the next competing shop.
Actually I'm beginning to become more and more interrested to find a way to break this protection. Sorta like showing them the finger
If anyone could point me towards some related sites I would be grateful!

Thanks!

Well #1 remember the people ultimately decide a store's policies no matter where you are.. If enough people raise a stink and stop buying products that suck, then the stores will react.

#2 am I dealing with a bunch of youngsters here? So you want to get past the copy protection? Last time I checked, there was no such thing as a "macrovision" type protection on a CD, so the old-school method of recording the CD via analog RCAs in real-time should work. Shoot, you could probably take the digital out on a consumer CD and run it to the digital in of a sound card(if applicable). Sure, it isn't as nice nor as swift as ripping, but it will still do the job, and the differemce in sound quality will be negligible if your sound card is decent enough..

-John M

I've thought about the digital in on a sound card, and believe me : I WILL use that option if everything else fails. I've got a DVD player over here with optical out and I've got a SB audigy card in my PC, so that shouldn't be a problem.

It's just that I believe that if nobody tries to do anything about this soon every new CD will have some form of this protection on it , making the lives of people like me (and lots of others on this board) much more difficult if we want to feed our Mp3 players.
So I can guarantee you that most people won't even go through the effort of re-recording the CD, digitally or not. Hey, that takes 2.5 hrs! (if it's a double CD, like in this case). So what will they do?
Simple, fire up audiogalaxy, kazaa, morpheus, bearshare or whichever file sharing utility they prefer and download the CD. My guess is next time most people wouldn't even go through the effort of purchasing the CD too. So in the end, music distributers shoot themselves in the foot. They just don't know it yet.

Wait until they have a store full of customers and then try to return it. LOUDLY.

I like your style!

Just to play Devil's Advocate...

There is a possibility that the disk isn't copy protected at all, and it's just a marginal pressing. I've seen that happen. Difficulty ripping != protection.

Isn't there an online list of all protected CDs?

Yes, there is such a list. But it relies on users to submit information about copy protected cds, so it might not be that acurate.
http://www.fatchucks.com

Marc

No Tony, it's definitely a protection of some sort.
Firstly, it's a double CD. Both CD's show the same symptoms. When I put them in my plextor 40xmax, the light keeps on blinking as if the Cd-rom can't find something it's looking for. In my 12x plextor writer the drive calms down, but it doesn't show anything when I want to see what's on the disk.

If I fire up EAC or audiograbber, both see the tracks, but they're shown as data, and thus not rippable. (is that a word?)

When I run Clony on them, it says they're both blank disks. CloneCd can copy them, but adds a lot of dummy sectors.

And the fact that both of the CD's don't play as they should on older audio cd-players (old = older than 3 years) is typical of copy protections.

I think a *might* have found a way to rip them after all, but it will take me several hours. If I'm successful, I'll post a how-to here.

Meanwhile I still don't know what the copy protection is, though I've got suspicions it's cactus data shield. Doesn't anybody know of a program that can ID this specific protection?

Unless I'm mistaken, you should be able to play the discs in a standard audio CD player with digital output that will play the discs properly and route the signal to a computer with correpsonding digital inputs. Of course this is only good for 1x copying. I have read, that some copy protection schemes are even able to disable the digital outputs on audio CD players, so even this may not work. Then there's always analog copying, which with high quality equipment should be almost indistinquishable from the original. But this would be giving in to the record companies.

Worse comes to worse, you could use Total Recorder to capture it in WAV format (1x speed) then encode with LAME. I do this with DVDs all the time, but it is time cosuming, and you'll have to break apart the WAV file for track separation. Good luck with the disc.

PS After you encode it, make sure put them out in the "music swapping" world...

That will only work if the CD Rom drive is able to play the CD in the first place. From what I read of his post it will not, as it doesn't recognize the disc as an audio CD. Total Recorder is great for those CDs that will play but can't be copied by conventional software means. It also works for "secure" WMA and Liquid Audio tracks. Even after purchasing Liquid Audio tracks, some do not grant you permission to burn to CD.

That will only work if the CD Rom drive is able to play the CD in the first place.
Oops, you have a good point there...

Yeah, today I gave up on the idea of being able to rip it. Maybe when programs evolve over time or somebody points me to a utility that can do it now I'll try it again.
So I wanted to used my DVD to play the CD and capture the audio from it's toslink output (it's my home-entertainment DVD, not a pc-drive). Guess what ? The DVD doesn NOT PLAY the friggin' CD! Though it's a Yamaha AND should be fully capable of playing audio CD's! AAAAARGH!

I haven't got any other cd playing devices with a digital out. So I guess I'll go the analog route then. Shouldn't be that bad, my home setup is pretty decent.
But if there is still a way to just rip the tracks, I would be most interested.

PS After you encode it, make sure put them out in the "music swapping" world...

This is something I normally don't do, but I must say this time I'm VERY tempted....

must....resist....temptation....aaargh!

Guess what ? The DVD doesn NOT PLAY the friggin' CD!

Again, copy protection prevents a consumer's legitimate usage of the product.

I'm sure there will be ways to rip the thing. If I had my hands on it, I could probably get it to rip successfully...

Well Tony if you want it I can send it to you. Just explain to me what you did then. Deal?

Hmmm. I would be interested in messing with it, just for the sake of idle curiosity. I've never actually had a protected disk in my hands to play with.

I'll contact you in a private message regarding this.

I'll send it to you ASAP. I hope you'll have better luck with it than I did.

Thanks!