Hi there, Bought a cd the other day, (Blu Cantrell - Bittersweet) which as far as i can tell is protected with Midbar's Cactus datashield protection. Needless to say, i couldnt rip it. Interesting enough i created an image using alchohol 120% selecting the "GenericCopy Protected cd" option. I then mounted this image with Daemon Tools, and then ripped the tracks off the image using Nero's "Save Track option" with the exception of a single click on the first track the quality of all the other tracks was perfect. I did try to use EAC but it blue screened my machine, ASPI didnt like it, so maybe just use Win32 as the rip method. I would be very interested if anyone else has any sucess with this method. Let me know!
Most likely there's no way to ged rid of clicks introduced by CDS by using another extraction software as the clicks are introduced when the drive tries to handle the purpously introduced C2 errors. All you can do is lower extraction speed, try with another drive and/or use some wave editor to get rid of the click(s). There's a free tool called deglitch but I haven't tried to de-click copyprotected CDs with it so far, so I can't tell how it performs. BTW: In http://www.digital-inn.de official EAC forum (at the bottom of the forum portal) there's a helpful sticky thread about ASPI problems._X_X_X_X_X_[small]AFTERDAWN FORUM RULES: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/2487[/small]
I recommend that you try EAC, CDEx and/or Easy CDD A Extractor. All available on this site. http://cd-rw.org/articles/archive/cactusdatashield.cfm
Pardon my naivite (as this i my first incursion to the audio threads hehe), but could you just rip use Alcohol120/Alcoholer (or BlindWrite) to make an exact duplicate? It worked when I backed up Cactus Datashield 200 - not the newest of course but I'm sure it would probably work for the Cactus Datashield 300 series. Again, please excuse my newbieness about all this hehe... not really an audio kinda person.
Data CDs have 3 layers of error detection while audio CDs only have 2. Because of this 80 minutes of cd quality PCM audio = 80*60*44100*2*2 bytes = 807.5 MB fit on an audio cd and not 700 MB, which is the case if the same media is written as data CD. 2 layers is enough (for playback) because 100% error free reading isn't necessary. Wrong samples can be interpolated easily without being noticable. This error detection/correction or interpolation on uncorrectable errors (= C2 errors) is done by the drive (no matter if standalone device or PC drive) on the fly. There are only 2 ways for software to notice if there were C2 errors: 1. Some drives report C2 errors to software that "asks" for it. 2. Re-read 1 or more times (ideally at different speeds) seems to give different results on the majority of interpolated errors if the reason is dirt or scratches. Both is not 100% reliable. So ... when reading data CDs the software knows for sure if a sector contains an error (-> sector defined as "unreadable") or not (no matter if it's caused by damages or by copy protection) while when reading audio CDs the drive always returns the data that were requested by software without "complaining" if there are errors to handle. For this reason you can only make an exact duplicate of an audio CD if it is not damaged. CDS's purpously introduced C2 errors appear like uncorrectable errors to the drive and cause interpolation to kick in. With software that uses (and drive that are able to report) C2 errors there's nothing that can be done to improve the drive's reading. Letting it re-read will just give the same result. Everything depends on the drive. Some hang/freeze when a CDS protected CD is inserted, some can't circumvent the manipulated TOC, no matter what software is used. If you're lucky with your drive, Alcohol120% should work, as well as audio rippers like EAC or Audiograbber, but not better.
Holy crappos that was indepth I guess I did get lucky with Alcohol120/BlindWrite since i have a fairly good burner (ASUS 522452). CloneCD didnt manage to make the cut however. The first time itried backing up the CD, i tried to do a Musicmatch --> Nero with DAE set to maximum and that almost worked except for popiing and crackinng here and there. When i set it down to DAE 4X then everything was all happy. I havnt had much time to daable with EAC but as you can prolly tell... im an amateur in the audio arena. Thanks for the detail.
here's what you do record the tracks to an audio tape. Use audio in on your sound card and a recorder to create a wav file and then convert wav to mp3. The only way to defeat that would be to mess up the cd so you couldn't listen to it and then no one would buy it. Rather than trying to crack the copy protection which is close to impossible simply by pass it by using the analog signal to make your recording rather than a digital one. I'd like to see RIAA and its international lap dog beat that.
Umnmm line in rips are a pain in the ass to deal with.. Not to mention that wavs are phucking huge which kinda defeats the point of ripping tracks. ohh and by the way, the RIAA can and will still bust your balls for copying the cd, doesnt matter how you did it.. digital or anolog a copy is a copy is a copy as far as they are concerned
Never had a problem copying CDS300 so far, but I didn't throw away my old stuff... : An old Pentium 100, Adaptec 1542B SCSI board, a Toshiba 4101X CD-Rom drive (2x) and an old DOS ripping-program. Insert any CDS protected CD, grab any track I want & copy it over to my Windows machine. No hickups, distortions or whatever. I usually only grab the tracks I cannot read the 'normal' way (under Windows) like this. Now, if you don't own old junk like this, just go here: http://www.storeroom.info/cdm/index_e.html Remember to check your reader in the Drive list. Clever, those Japanese!
