What's all this CD copy control stuff anyway...

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The following is a cut'n'paste of a posting elsewhere, so please understand if not all of it makes total sense posted here - the content though may be of interest.
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(with apologies to Bob Pease).

The thread on here about BMG not producing any more CD's without copy control mechanisms became a subject of great interest to me at the weekend.

I bought a copy of the Foo Fighters latest 'One by One' after hearing it playing in a music store and had to ask what it was.

A CD full of superb real rock music, well recorded and needing to be played at realistic levels

I didn't even read the 0.5mm high text explaining that the disk only works on audio CD players. Putting into the CDROM drive to catalogue it automatically launched a media player that then streams some compressed mp3 quality audio, AFAICT, to allow listening on a PC. The cataloguing prog wouldn't do it's job, and I'm now peeved that I cannot get the full glory of the CD through the Nait / Kans that serves as a back end to the PC audio.

So, I thought, how does this stuff work...

It seems the BMG discs just add another TOC to the disc, that contains reference to the DATA only portion, making the real audio tracks invisible. Home CD players read TOC starting from the beginning of the disc, but PC CD drives start from the other end of the disc, as with multi-session CD's the latest TOC will be last on the disc.

Time for some fun most people with PC's these days have CD-writers, and many of the software suites (e.g. EZCD Creator) allow 'Session Selection' where you can choose to read an earlier session, or TOC, on a disc.

So, I pondered, it couldn't really be that easy, could it?

Well it is, select the other session on the disc, and suddenly an audio CD appears, and to prove there's no other music-degrading errors on the disc, I extracted all the audio tracks to the HD as WAV files.

I'm listening to them now....

Keep it quiet - I wasn't here, right :)

A.
 
what recording companies always fail to rememeber is that computers can read ANYTHING. you cant just do something like that, its way too easy. plus, the people who wouldnt know what to do would just go download it anyway...

instead of protecting artist's music, they should go out and make sure the music is worth publishing anway. if there was more DECENT music out there, i would pay more. hell, if i knew each cd would be as good as the one song i heard from it, i wouldnt mind spending $20 - $30 on each one. plus, 9 times out of 10, its poorly recorded!

to the recording companies: quality, not quantity. make us want to NOT pirate the music.
 
I think that they forget that music is meant to be listen. So it must be copen somewhere in the chain so their never going to be a protection that would enclose the data completly as we would never be able to listen to it.

(I wasn't their but it's look like when they made a copy protection on commodore 64. It only made people copy more.)
 
It is not impossible to imagine a future where we have

a) encrypted audio
b) encrypted firewire links
c) single-chipset integrated decode/DAC/amplifier (or preamp driving discrete output stage)

1. Think already at how impossible it is to get a hardware Dolby Digital codec, despite the fact that one exists in every DVD player sold. This means it is easy to trust the hardware.

2. Unless the encryption is poor and subject to cryptanalytic attack (deCSS) the datastream will be secure against reasonable forms of attack.

I see the professional audio business as the largest barrier to this, since they have a need for components which ignore copy "protection". It isn't a guarantee of accessibility though--look at professional video, which uses serial links. It is possible that pro audio will move to a format that is incompatible with anything that consumers can purchase.
 
Take a look at sites like:
http://www.fatchucks.com/z3.cd.html
http://ukcdr.org/

It is already happening on large scale. Biggest problem is that lots of the protection schemes are undocumented and patented. So this means that if one of them is not used anymore, there will be no way to get legal access at the audio because nobody knows how it was done and it is illegal to break encrypted content. In a 100 years from now, people will wonder why music became unobtainable.

Other problem is that most of these protected CD's are not red book compliant. They contain data that is not supposed to be there or deliberate errors. This means that the lifetime and quality of them is seriously degraded. Not that the masses care about quality.

Fine if your cd contained a mp3 alike format and its player. What is your garantee it will work under windows 2005? Will BMG/Sony/.... give a free upgrade to everybody who has bought that cd? Will it work under Linux, Mac....?

The encrypted firewire links are already there. The chips exsist (do a search at TI). Content can be encrypted from source to destination. Already some creative products turn off the digital output of the soundcard when playing drm material with the windoze media player under xp. Other chipsets protect the link to digital connected flat panels.

Something never taken into consideration is that live music may take a high flight because of this. If you cannot listen to quality music on a recorded format, maybe caring people will go back to concerts.

Sorry to sound pessimistic, but audio (as understood by pre-recorded music) is going downhill from now. AND IT IS TOOOO LATE. IT ALREADY HAPPENED.
 
diyAudio Senior Member
Joined 2002
Nahh...

Hi,

I've yet to find a CD or DVD for that matter I couldn't decrypt.

Encryption is just like burglar alarms,it is made by humans and once you understand it it can be decoded.

I'm not that pessimistic,stop buying the encoded stuff and they will loose this silly attitude anytime soon.

The entire recording industry is in dire straits as it is already,they need us to survive not the other way around.

Banzai,:mad:
 
I agree with the fact that the quality and content of modern recording is going down. Some professional recording studio will record a full cd in 2 hour. D'ont tell me that they can take the time to listen and tweak in all that time.

Recently listen to a cd who was made in a private studio (It took a full three weeks of work) And the quality of the recording is something to be heard.
 
All,
:cop: hoping you don't intend to post any sort of howto concerning illegal CD copying here ... do that in private and via email, ok? :cop:

BTW,
i loathe the copy protection mechanisms myself and i have to agree with Havoc.
And my audio CDP now and then refuses to play a non-redbook-compatible CD whereas the CD-ripping sftware i am using never refused to copy one and the copies always were playable on my audio CDP. :no:, i am not volunteering in public what ripping software i am using.

What i am observing (and never expected to happen): the vinyl market, almost dead already, is recovering. A buddy wanted to have a private audiophile recording pressed & released on vinyl. No chance, the small hiQ vinyl pressing factories are bookes out, working at the limits of their capacity. More and more 180gr vinyl audiophile re-issues, and some of amazing quality can be had, catalogues are growing.

So, i confess i now and then copy a CD i own as vinyl several times already, i have bad conscience of not having paid my license to listen to that music.
But vinyl copying? not an issue. I prefer vinyl anyway.
 
Retired diyAudio Moderator
Joined 2002
Concerning audio copying (not the methods), how does the quality of a copied audio cd compare to the original? Has anyone considered upgrades to cdr drives to make them record better? (better power supply for it, etc.)

I like to copy all new cds that I get so that I have a copy for my car. I tend to ruin cds in my car. I keep the originals for home so that they stay in good condition.

--
Brian
 
diyAudio Senior Member
Joined 2002
LEGAL

Bernhard,

According to german law and ours as well (probably many other countries too) you're entitled to copy your original media to an other/same format as a backup copy.

Provided of course it is for personal use.

So don't feel too bad about it.

What does get me mad is some labels putting out music not all players can read.
That to me is a rip off.

Viva vinyl,;)
 
The music industry is trying (desperately, it seems), to mantain profits. The scope is wrong IMHO; how can you expect people NOT to copy cds when most of them sell for $15-25 and... well, suck?! Instead of promoting quality artists, they bug the listener. I download mp3's, but i ALWAYS buy cds i like a lot. Most people do.

And about the copy protection schemes... well, they always end up decoded. Even they managed you to NOT be able to read the data stream, if music comes out of CD player, it will be copied.

Hopefully things will change.
 
diyAudio Senior Member
Joined 2002
THEY SUCK.

Hi,

The scope is wrong IMHO; how can you expect people NOT to copy cds when most of them sell for $15-25 and... well, suck?!

They're a big joke.
Philips sells cassette recorders allowing you to tape anything since the early seventies: the music industry was doing great.

They now sell audio CD burners to make your copies and complain??

No,the computor guys outsmarted them and they can't have that.

Divide et impera.
Just remember industry, you can't have it both ways!

Cheers,:mad:
 
Yeah. It's a pitty, but you can't really expect a kid who owns a cd burner to pay for music he knows he won't be listening anymore in two months. I mean, have you noticed how the 90% of "artists" complaining and joining causes against filesharing and CD copying are lame pop performers? Makes you wonder.

I beleive it's time for the music industry to rethink their foundations if they want to survive. Most people are willing to pay the price of a CD, but they want quality in return.
 
diyAudio Senior Member
Joined 2002
I AGREE BUT...

Hi,

As far as I remember this was always a problem.

How could you possibly tell that after so many years you would still be listening to say Elton John,Bowie,The Stones,Beatles etc.?

I agree that nowadays most artists score a one off never to be heard off again.
This is very true for commercial music but wasn't that always the case?

For the "alternative",more artistic music you just buy what suits you best.
That kind of music isn't bothering the industry so much even if it does get copied a bit.

It's a sign of the times really,look at all these other businesses jumping on the bandwagon never to be heard off six months later.

A lot of these problems start with the public being less discerning,just buying or consuming music as if it were a chewing gum.(did I say that?)

Ciao,;)
 
Well, it was always like this. The thing is the techonolgy has reached a point where you can get an EXACT duplicate of an audio cd in minutes, or download a very high quality file from the net in the same time. With tapes quality was limited; it's not the case with digital audio. No wonder the music industry is scared s**tless; it's just they're not taking the right course of action.

And the public *IS* less discerning for sure! :D Most people don't know what they want until they see what's shoved down their throats...
 
Yeah, right, copy protection . . .
I wanted to play a CD on my computer.
The crappy non-removable MP3 player installing with the CD started.

Closed it, loaded winamp,
clicked "add URL", typed "cda://e".

The tracks were ALL there, and WAV file output plugin worked, used digital audio extraction, everything worked.

I read on the CD: "This CD has some copy protection", it was a BMG one.

And "intact copies" in Nero worked too.(I burned an ISO, I just wanted to try copy protection)

I think this is more an "extract to disk" protection, since CD burnig software isn't seeing anything, but you can't extract files to disk(Unless you're not an ignorant that doesn't know how to start something else than M$IE)
 
I've bought a fews cd's recently that won't play on my dvd player or pc.
I've taken them back to the store and demanded a refund. Sale of goods act is pretty good here in the uk. If it's not fit for the purpose you get your money back.

If enough people did this the record companies would soon get the message. It gets very costly for them when a product is returned.

res
 
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