david gray's new album - copy protected :(

[ocdwhiteboard]

Just bought david gray's new album (life in slow motion) and for the first time ever I haven't been able to rip a CD using EAC...

I can't explain how mad I am about this, I bought the damn thing, all I want to be able to do is listen to it on my home system which happens to be a media server/HCPC setup!

Does any one know of software which can circumvent this annoying crap?

 

[The Dude]

depends on the copy type... I'd give A-ray scanner a whirl and see what it tells you about the disc

 

[Eddy Boy]

You could agrue it is no longer a CD as the copy protection added is outside the specifcation for CDs layed down by Phillips.

Ho Hum.

 

[ocdwhiteboard]

not very much unfortunately, gives details of the length of the CD and the number of tracks, sector scan simply says no protection detected

 

[The Dude]

A small spanner in the works that...

I rip everything I buy as well, so will do some research matey, post back if you find anything, I'll do the same..

 

[LV426]

As a last resort - stick the CD in a regular CD player, connect analog (line out) up to your soundcard (line in), and re-record it onto your HDD. You'd be hard pressed to notice any real degradation......

 

[Erick]

You could always download the album as well, surely it can't be illegal if you already have the CD.

 

[GaryB]

I used CDex and ripped it to MP3 to play in the car with no problems.

 

[GazH]

Had the same with an album a few month ago...

Can't remember where I read this but...

When you put the CD in the drive hold down <SHIFT> to prevent the CD from Autorunning (when it Autoruns it sets up something to copy protect the CD) or switch off CD autorunning (Auto Insert Notification?) for the drive.
If you have already allowed the CD to autorun reboot the machine and try again.

Obviously if you are running MCE you probably don't want to switch off Autorunning or don't have a keyboard connected so you may have to do this from a different machine and copy the album over after.

It worked for me....might be worth giving it a whirl

HTH

Cheers

Gaz

 

[The Dude]

Unless it's something really fancy, I'd imagine 'Alcohol 120%' should get you around the problem...certainly works for anything which insists on installing those awful media players to get discs reading on the PC.... you make a clone of the CD minus its nasty bits, then rip the clone using EAC as per normal...

 

[Monty Burns]

Hey Guys

there was a form of protection added to CD's a while ago. You will need to do some research to "fix" it yourself but once you know how you do it all you need is a black marker pen!

It involves something like the TOC (table of Contents). I *believe* and my memory is very bad, that a CD player logic only uses the TOC on the Inner ring but, for some reason the TOC is read on the outer ring in preference on CD-Rom (and DVD I guess?) drives. Now, if I remember rightly (and i probably don't), if a CD has no outer ring then a computer CD-rom drive will then resort to the inner ring that cd-players always use.

The idea is that a duff outer ring shows nothing is installed on a disk meaning, that when it is read in a CD-ROM drive it shows a blank legally formated disk. The simple method I remember reading round this was to take a black cd-marker to the outer ring, making it invalid and forcing your cd-rom drive to read the TOC from the inner ring!

I have never had to do this though so I have no idea if I was being fed BS or the truth.

 

[Monty Burns]

/me does the happy dance

Check this out for more details on TOC scrambling. I was *almost* right, at least going in the right direction.

and there is lots of bit of information regarding it here

I do think it sucks donkeys that you cannot backup your own data. Take my example, I moved to Germany recently and will be going to China. Instead of being able to just rip everything i have (Dvd's to Divx, music to MP3) i have to carry around all my disks. Space and weight are valuable to me, VERY valuable. Ive got over 150 DVD's and around 1000 CD's, all these could so easily sit on a couple of hard disks and I could leave my originals at home.

Sucks don't it?!

 

[RobsterD]

Had same prob with a Blue Nile disc,I copied the disc with CloneCD,this got rid of the copy protection and then ripped with EAC ,might work

 

[meansizzler]

not very much unfortunately, gives details of the length of the CD and the number of tracks, sector scan simply says no protection detected

Go but the Cd off Napster, then you can Remove the DRM protection...works everytime for me....

 

[probedb]

I find AnyDVD is excellent for removing copy protection from CDs.

Alternatively since you own the album see if you can find a lossless version on newsgroups. I had to do this with the DualDisc of NIN - With Teeth as my DVD-ROM was having non of it!

 

[TopMeTom]

maybe the player realised how rubbish the cd was??

 

[phunkey_monkeh]

^ hehe

 

[Monty Burns]

maybe the player realised how rubbish the cd was??

Ahh who knew AI would FINALY be useful and so intelligent!

 

[ocdwhiteboard]

maybe the player realised how rubbish the cd was??

sound just like my wife, she hates david gray!

thanks to everyone for their very useful contributions. I'll give this stuff a go later and see if I can get it working. If not I'll be returning the CD as it is useless to me. I've half a mind to return it if I do manage to rip it just to spite the b******s

 

[cameronl]

I sometimes find that running a software 'backup' utility on a different drive does the trick. If I have troubles running EAC/DVD Decrypt at home on a peice of software then I try another drive - this always seems to work.

CaM

 

[ocdwhiteboard]

thanks for the tips. Got this working now:

Ripped the disc's image using Alcohol 120%, mounted the image with Daemon tools and ripped it to ape files using EAC. A bit more convoluted but not really any longer than doing it straight with EAC.

 

[meansizzler]

thanks for the tips. Got this working now:

Ripped the disc's image using Alcohol 120%, mounted the image with Daemon tools and ripped it to ape files using EAC. A bit more convoluted but not really any longer than doing it straight with EAC.

don't you loose quality as you have already ripped the tracks with alocohol?, so what's the point ripping it again other than to compress it and loose more quality, as is alocohol not perofming a DAE on your disc...

 

[ocdwhiteboard]

don't you loose quality as you have already ripped the tracks with alocohol?, so what's the point ripping it again other than to compress it and loose more quality, as is alocohol not perofming a DAE on your disc...

hi meansizzler,

I'm not sure that alcohol would lose quality in ripping the CD, my understanding was that it reproduces a disc image. as far as I understand it it isn't extracting the audio tracks, merely copying the image, minus the copy protection. I stand to be corrected on this as I have not really used alcohol before.

just to be clear though, I used alcohol to copy the image of the CD. I then used EAC to read this image, in exactly the same way as it reads a standard CD. EAC compresses this wav file into an ape file (losslessly, so not losing any fidelity). I didn't use alcohol to rip MP3s or other compressed formats of the audio tracks.

 

[GrahamMG]

I do so hate the words "lossless compression", it never sits that easy with me but.........

 

[ocdwhiteboard]

I do so hate the words "lossless compression", it never sits that easy with me but.........

why not? do .zip files lose information during the compression process? or have I misunderstood you - do you mean it on a more semantic level?