Back for my birthday, Cathy bought me The Cat Empire CD. Which is great, I love The Cat Empire. After unwrapping the present, I read the back cover and realized it was one of the broken copy protected EMI CDs. And after much howling and frustration it went back to the shop (still in its shrinkwrap) to be swapped for a CD that complies with the Red Book standard.
Fast forward to last week, when I was at my local library. There was The Cat Empire CD! “Great, I’d Love to listen to that”, thinks I. I take it home, and in a fit of pique decide to see if I can load it onto my MP3/WMA player… and it does, using XP’s Media Player.
Isn’t copy protection meant to work? I guess that’s why I bought the LiteOn CD drive – it has a reputation for reading “difficult” disks. I can listen to the music, and haven’t paid for it, when I would have been happy to pay for it… the CIA calls that “blowback”, don’t they?
Geek Rant dot org
I’m aware of at least one EMI release that had copy-protection only to the point of having a Windows AutoRun that asked politely “Would you like to install EMI’s evil rights-destroying proprietary dodgy CD player software?”, and helpfully did nothing if you refused, allowing you free reign to go and rip the tracks to your heart’s content.
I bought a CD yesterday, the new Cat Empire one, Two Shoes, and Windows Media won’t even recognise the disc!!! Neither will iTunes, and when I open the contents of the CD on my computer it doesn’t even display all the song files! Yes, it was one of those EMI CD’s. *sigh*
Nick,
try Audiograbber, http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/. It rips most discs.
Unfortunately, I still end up with hisses and squeeks using Audiograbber….