CD Copy Protection Woes

Ian writes:

I’ve just read your article on copy-protected CDs and I must say it was a very interesting read. I received the Robbie Williams album today but am having problems ripping the tracks to mp3. I have always used EAC for this purpose in the past but for some reason it won’t recognise the Escapology album. I am using the same version as you (v0.9) but still the CD isn’t detected. I can’t get even get my DVD-writer to detect the CD at all in explorer but at least my Lite-On CD writer does (not in EAC though). I’ve tried CDEx to rip to wav first then to mp3 in EAC but I am getting errors for the first track (the others rip ok, well 2-13 with a partial cd rip on 14 doing the trick). Any ideas how I can either get track 1 to rip ok without errors or to get EAC to recognise my CD? Any info would be appreciated.

I should point out (with a suitably snooty tone of voice!) that my role here is not to encourage the breaching of copyright. But I am certainly interested in all these copy protection issues, and seeing where they work and where they fail is a matter definitely worth exploring.

The CD player As I mentioned in my article, one of my computers would not recognise the CD initially. This seems to be a function of the operating system, the CD-ROM (or whatever) drive’s firmware and, perhaps, the BIOS within the computer itself. Possibly the firmware in your DVD burner has different standards for checking disc integrity than a typical CD-ROM drive.

Anyway, the work-around I used in that case was to simply insert the CD into the drive, close the door and wait. The AUTORUN.INF file in the root folder duly invoked PLAYER.EXE, also in the root folder, and the player application started. This seems to get the CD recognised before the firmware has a chance to start complaining. Once this was working Explorer was quite happy to display the files on the CD, and EAC was happy to extract the files.

If the PLAYER.EXE application doesn’t start up, perhaps you need to check your system’s setup. Have you disabled the automatic CD startup function in Windows? You will need to re-enable it if this is the case. Since PLAYER.EXE seems to be a version of Windows Media Player, check to make sure that Media Player works okay on your computer. Otherwise I’m at a loss.

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