I've just purchased a copy of Massive Attacks new album. Upon placing this cd in my computer (I don't have a decent stereo, the computer is my entertainment system) I have discovered a new protection system called 'Copy Control' (http://copycontrol.emi.com.au/faqs_copy_control.asp). This has got up my nose a bit because: a) I want to play it on Windows Media Player (and I have to use their crappy player); and b) I think they have a real nerve stopping me from copying my own music! Does anyone know what I can do to play this using WMP?
How do you know "Copy Control" audio protection is on the cd? Use ClonyXXL to scan the cd and see if the program detects the cd protection. I'm aware of Key2Audio, Cactus Data Shield, and Doc.loc. ClonyXXL:http://www.primacom.net/~m6030328/downloads.htm If ClonyXXL don't detect any audio protection, then try YaPs (Yet Another Protection Scanner). http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_utils_2.shtml Shoey
I've read somewhere that Cactus Data Shield 200 is used for the CD you're talking about. If you browse the directories on the CD with Windows Explorer you'll probably find a text file, something like version.txt, inside there's information about used copy protection. With the "marker" aka "post it" trick (make the outer ring(s) = data session unreadable) I managed to play back another CDS200 protected CD as normal audio CD with several audio players (I don't use WMP). It worked on 3 of my 4 drives. You can use Exact Audio Copy to rip+copy the CD (the "detect TOC manually" feature is the key to success). The copy won't contain protection. If the surface of your disk is undamaged (no scratches + no fingerprints) you can use some software like CloneCD to create an image and use an image handling software to extract audio data to .wav (I did this once and it worked. I don't remember if it was CDMage or WinISO). EAC is harder to set up (EAC guides are mentioned in this forum very often, you'll find some with the search) but results are more reliable (=error-proof). You'll reach a similar security if you do the CloneCD method 2 times (ideally with 2 different drives) and compare the results with a wave editor (e.g. Nero's, EAC's or free Audacity). Because of the errors introduced by copy protection 2 rips with 2 different drives probably won't be identical, but you'll know what positions you have to listen to closely before burning the CD you'll use. ____________ Because of the hassle copy protected "CDs" cause and to prevent these problems from getting bigger I'd return the CD to the shop because obviously it's defective and make them give me a unprotected version or my money back.
If you go to this link, you can get a good idea on how audio cd protection works, and "possible" ways to get around the cd protection. Notice the CD-Freaks team uses EAC for 7 types of audio cd protection. Scroll down near the bottom and see how the LiteON LTR 52x beat 6 of the 7 audio cd protections. Again, the link is just a "guideline" on how audio cd protection works. One thing is for sure, the LiteON LTR 52x drive is probably "pound 4 pound" the best burner for backing up all types of formats (pc/audio cd protection). Whether Copy Protection Control can be defeated< I dunno Another nice tool to extract files to your hd that you might consider trying (if you can see the wave files) is IsoBuster. IsoBuster:http://www.smart-projects.net/isobuster/ http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=99&Page=10 Shoey
Shoey, 2 Things about the test in your link: 1. If a drive can rip a copy protected disk or not is not worth very much IMO if it's not tested if the drive handles mastered C1/C2 errors (as in CDS200) in a way that they are inaudible. They should have made wave substractions between different drives' ripps (or take a decent standalone CD player->digital out->soundcard digital in rip as reference) to see if all drives give decent results (EAC's error correction doesn't help here, as erroreous values are reported over and over again by a drive). It's impressive that the liteon was able to read almost everything, but from this test we don't know about extraction quality - OK. If it had been anoying, they'd had mentioned it... 2. As you might now, EAC's burst mode test+copy is as secure as secure mode if test+copy CRCs match. If the CD is clean and new, it could work to use burst mode (and don't care about reported errors, just trust that they're interpolated properly) to even get a good sounding extraction of CDS100 with the liteon. In case you have this drive and a CDS100 CD you could try it - the result would be very interesting. CU tigre
tigre, You would have to take that issue up with the CD-Freaks team. I didn't perform the hardware test, but do understand what you're saying. Shoey
Shoey, Tigre, and Ozyboy! 100th Window did scare me a bit when I heard of the copy protection that apparently rendered the CD "uncopyable". I was happier once I noticed that (pre-release of the CD) versions of the tracks were appearing in MP3 in file share engines (particulalry Kazaa). Someone was encoding it - but were these encodes dirty (decoded to analogue then recorded to digital - not the best for sound quality)? Anyway, a friend bought the CD, and was very unhappy when he tried to digitally record the CD to Minidisc (effectively audio compression to ATRACS - Sony audio compression standard - one of the reasons they don't like MP3 - and the fact that they own one of the worlds largest music companies ... another day for that one!). Somewhere the contents of the CD were stopping him from a "digital" copy. I have a bit of a reputation as a "music lover" (read into that what you will) so he gave me the CD to see if I would "appreciate" it. As soon as I put the CD into my PC, the CD automatically (without any interaction by myself) installed an application that acts as a player for the CD AND enables you to play the CD using WMP. If you cancel this installation whilst it is happening, WMP and Winamp would not play the CD! I am not really happy about software being installed on my PC without my knowledge, but I let it do it ultimately. Once it had installed everything - all players seem to play the CD (inc WMP)! Anyway, I explored the CD to find out that all the audio data on the CD is actually contained in one raw data file rather than a number of .cda files. I normally "appreciate" CDs using Exact Audio Copy and LAME codecs. EAC wuld not recognize the CD as having .cda tracks on it - so encoding seemed to be veto. Anyway, I have another great little tool that I use for cleaning up .wavs for my music appreciation called "Cool Edit Pro". It has a facility that .wav encodes .cda files. Believe it or not, CEP DID recognize .cda files on 100th window. I set up CEP to batch encode all 9 .cdas on 100th Window, and set it off. I thought that I could use EAC and LAME to then encode these .wavs to MP3. Not quite that simple. CEP DID encode 8 of the 9 .cdas, but would not encode the first one (well, it did, but only the first four seconds or so!). So I had tracks 2 to 9 as .wavs, but was concerned about getting track one. (It is worth noting that when you convert the tracks to .wav, track 9 has some silence at the end of it, and THEN there is a hidden tenth track - just dark beats, but pretty cool to find it there!) Anyway, I am stuck trying to .waz track one, before I can do any MP3 encoding. I did it the easiest way I could think of - I played the track using the EMI installed player, and recorded the audio stream using CEP. Done. So, I had Tracks 1 to 9 (and hidden track 10) and encoded as I usually did. So, I burnt a .wav CD of all ten tracks for my fiend, who can now transfer these ten tracks to his Minidisc player. I have encodced the tracks and archived them, BUT the most interesting thing is the following: CloneCD 4 copied the CD with no problems whatsoever! So EMI are therefore concerned with encoding their CDs tracks, not so worried about CD copying. CloneCD is excellent, and very good at this type of thing (I think that it was born out of a need to perfectly replicate Playstation CDs - therfore no need to "chip" the PS). It is worth noting that CloneCD 4 is also a version more than 12 months old - well before EMI copy protection was defined for 100th window.
If it's possible to rip a copy protected audio CD with your drive + CloneCD it should be possible with your drive + EAC too (use "detect TOC manually" feature or the post-it trick). If the CD's surface isn't perfectly clean, EAC will probably give better results.
I was going to mention EAC, but waited until someone with more knowledge that I when it comes to audio. I do know CD-Freaks uses EAC to determine if drives can defeat audio cd protections (Key2audio, CactusData Shield). Shoey
Hi Ozboy, You might want to try this let me know if it works. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/31650
I'm in Sydney and I have a cds protected cd - norah jones (emi copycontrol logo on the front I stupidly didn't see when I bought it a few weeks back) I've been using eac with an acer 1610A drive, in secure mode. It reads the disc fine - 14 audio tracks plus data but when you extract to hd as wave files there are multiple pops and crackles (intended by emi) even though eac reports the extraction as 100% ok. When you press remove glitches, eac automatically removes approx 1400 glitches per track leaving only one or two audible ones per track Does anyone know how I manually remove these last two crackles ??? eg which wave editor could I use to stop and modify the track manually ?? Thanks ps all I want to do is play my own cds on my own mp3 player (ibead). I think emi sucks the big one but all I see in the shops are more and more emi cds with the copy control logo on
I think Easy CDDA might be worth testing on protected CDs. http://cd-rw.org/software/audio_software/cd-da_extractors/easy_cdda_extractor.cfm In the latest update, it was mentioned in the changelog that techniques for bypassing more protection has been applied. Latest version also has a more secure ripping mode. Currently I don't have a single protected audio CDs around, so I would be interested in hearing how well this works?
Well, enjoying the few tracks played on TripleJ, Australia's government sponsored "youth" radio station, I got onto thinking that I should get the new Alex Lloyd CD. Buy disk, bring home, pop into computer... and _nothing_. Great. An EMI Copy Controlled logo instead of a "Compact Disk Digital Audio" logo on the case. I bought a personal license to the music, delivered on an almost utterly useless medium. Almost. CDparanoia will extract the audio into .wav format, which can then be further munged into .ogg or .mp3 for my listening pleasure. For those of you with access to a linux box, this becomes a rather simple process: 1) get cdparanoia (Debian, which I don't recommend as a desktop OS, but works fine as a server OS, makes this easy: "apt-get install cdparanoia" and you're off. 2) analyze disk, to see if the tracks can be seen: cdparanoia -vsQ should see something like this: Checking /dev/cdrom for cdrom... Testing /dev/cdrom for cooked ioctl() interface CDROM sensed: ATAPI compatible NEC CD-ROM DRIVE:28C Verifying drive can read CDDA... Expected command set reads OK. Table of contents (audio tracks only): track length begin copy pre ch =========================================================== 1. 17255 [03:50.05] 0 [00:00.00] no no 2 2. 18162 [04:02.12] 17255 [03:50.05] no no 2 3. 22928 [05:05.53] 35417 [07:52.17] no no 2 4. 16272 [03:36.72] 58345 [12:57.70] no no 2 5. 13688 [03:02.38] 74617 [16:34.67] no no 2 6. 18205 [04:02.55] 88305 [19:37.30] no no 2 7. 15245 [03:23.20] 106510 [23:40.10] no no 2 8. 21355 [04:44.55] 121755 [27:03.30] no no 2 9. 20397 [04:31.72] 143110 [31:48.10] no no 2 10. 15728 [03:29.53] 163507 [36:20.07] no no 2 11. 13602 [03:01.27] 179235 [39:49.60] no no 2 TOTAL 192837 [42:51.12] (audio only) 3) extract audio tracks, in batch mode "-B", verbosely (-v). Pull #'s 1-11 (all): cdparanoia -Bv "1-11" Wait. The status bar should show the smiley for all good, and :^D for extraction complete.
Another audio cd protection bites the dust! Thanks for the valuable info oevans, much appreciated! Shoey
hmmm, I just bought the new Radiohead "Hail to the Thief" CD with CDS200.0.4 4.0 build 10b on it. I popped it in my LG CD-RW drive and played it on Winamp....no problems....sounds great and plays as normal .cda's. Then, I used Audiocatalyst and digitally ripped the whole thing to .wav files and then to Mp3s and it all sounds perfect....now, where exactly does protection come into this? I haven't tried copying it directly to a CD-R, but what would be the point? once I have the .wav files, I can just burn those to a CD... I knew this "copy protection" wouldn't work. *sigh*
I'm curious though, I read somewhere that you could just take a black magic marker and run it along the edge of the cd and it will take all the encoding off. There wouldn't be any need for all the software and trouble to go through. Is that something some of you have tried before?
Having looked at this in depth, my recommendations are exact audio copy plus a v good cd burner which has a v accurate read of digital audio stream - the liteon 52 suits the job for me (make sure you update to the latest firmware)
Ta-mater, Not every "rom" has the ability to recognize(extract) CD 200 cd protection m8. Did you try your dvd\cd-rom& extract the waves to your hd? If the "rom" successfully extracts all tracks of the audio cd protection then the audio cd protection is defeated. Shoey
I've been wrestling with 'Hail to the thief'. It seems it's all very much hardware dependant. My findings so far after reading the whole thread and doing my own trials.... Firstly, not all extractors are the same. Easy CD-DA - crashed at 4% CDPARANOIA (linx) - stopped at 4% Audio grabber pulled all tracks off successfully. These wav files all had a deliberate glitch at exactly every 6 seconds on the left channel only. Then I went for the Blindwrite / Daemon Tools method. Extracted to BWF fine. Mounted in Daemon tools and extracted tracks with easy CD-DA. Burned .wav files to a CDR using Nero. Results: All tracks have an audible glitch (1 only) at exactly 9 seconds into the song, afterwhich there are no audible problems. These tests were done on my laptop. I used my standard IDE CDROM drive to extract from 'Hail to the thief'. Burning was through my external Yamaha CRW-F1. All software used was current versions. So it looks like hardware and error correction is the key to defeating this system properly. Now, the next test will be to extract from the external drive using HD as the intermediate storage.
