So I bought the new Foo Fighters CD today because I've heard many great things about the acoustic section, disc 2. I go to import it to my computer so that I can listen to it without the CD present and so I can copy it to my MP3 player, which because it's kind of a camera/MP3 player combo deal, can only play MP3s, and not WMAs or OGG or anything else.

Turns out, the copy utility on the CD copies the songs in wma format that I can't open in Goldwave because it's copy protected. I can't even open it read-only. I tried importing it through iTunes, but I only got hash, not music. And to top it all off, the title song is in some weird .wax format.

Even though I can get around this by downloading audacity and "record what you hear," that would involve listening to each song one by one, all the way through the album. While I'll listen to every song at one point or another anyway, I don't want to mess with recording each one individually. I'd rather import them, quick and easy, and play them whenever I feel like it.

This is dumb. Because of corporate paranoia and greed, I can't use the music I purchased, for my own personal use, as I want to. I'll tell you this now: I don't share music. I've stopped downloading a long time ago. Why can't I use what I bought, for my own personal, non-commercial use, as I see fit. This is stupid.

/rant

That why I hate much of the music industry. It sucks when art is made and managed by corporations.

If you Google a bit I bet there are plenty of apps that will decrypt the disc.

I don't have the Foo Fighters CD to test it out, but I've used dBpowerAMP to rip some of my CDs that weren't recognized or couldn't be ripped by other programs.

If you do an analog rip, it basically does this but without you having to listen to the songs. So it gets done a lot more quickly.

No copy protection is one of the plusses of the dualdisc version.

Did you bother trying not letting the software it tries to autorun launch and then rip it? That's one reason I keep autorun off always. (Holding shift while inserting a CD and the disc is being scanned also disables autorun that one time.) I know some of those programs sometimes mess up rips. Also there's the felt-tip marker around the edge of the bottom of the disc method for killing copy protection (I don't know if this still works on newer CDs though).

Unfortunately there's the quality loss of going out through the DAC and back through the ADC on your soundcard. You probably won't notice without decent gear, but it's still stupid. Better off finding something that can crack it.

Interesting, I just read the dualdisc version has copy protection as well even though it's not listed. If that's the case, then I guess just not letting it autorun does get around it (like I said, I always keep it off so I wouldn't have noticed it if it is there).

*edit* Well, nevermind on there being copy protection on the dualdisc version, cause I just checked it and there's not. I'd still say go with not letting it autorun though.

*edit2* Nevermind that, it is in there, it just took it a while for the popping to kick in. So yeah, definitely don't let it autorun.

Try the demo of Adobe Audition, it opens just about everything...well, just about any kind of files I would ever use, including *.wma. It'll open the wma and you can save it as an mp3. Yay.

Am I the only person who sees a far simpler way to get the CD onto your computer?

HOW IRONIC

Yea if its bugging you that much...I could send it to you. Since you bought it.

I was dumb and had autorun enabled in Windows. Not too big of a deal though. Simply loaded it up in Linux, a couple of minutes with KAudioCreator, and I have both discs in Ogg Vorbis, which I can later encode into MP3 at my leisure. For some reason, LAME isn't installed, and I can't find it in the apt cache, but no big deal. I have the music, and that's all I care about for now.

Don't turn the OGG's into MP3s. You'll degrade the quality converting lossy to lossy. Rerip them to encode them in MP3.

I will eventually. For the time being, it'll be fine though. Plus, I'm not such an audiophile that I noticed the difference between 160 kbps and 192 kbps unless I listen to both samples back to back and I'm listening very carefully. Plus, my MP3 player/camera has a relatively poor quality decoder, so it won't make a big diffrence (still saving for a Zen Touch, someday...)

the cd audio tracks themselves are always rippable... Just set the kbs to 320 and there is virtually no detectable loss when you use mp3.


cd-ex has never failed me yet.


If this happens again, try cdex.

yeah... its annoying, nut a little searching comes up with this



Start with a Windows 2000/XP system with empty CD drives.

1. Click the Start button and select Control Panel from the Start Menu.
2. Double-click on the System control panel icon.
3. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button.
4. Configure Device Manager by clicking "Show hidden devices" and "Devices by connection," both from the View menu.
5. Insert the CD into the computer and allow the SunnComm software to start. If MediaMax has never been started before on the same computer, the SbcpHid driver should appear on the list for the first time. However, on some systems Windows needs to be rebooted before the driver becomes visible.

At this point you can attempt to copy tracks from the CD with applications like MusicMatch Jukebox or Windows Media Player. Copies made while the driver is active will sound badly garbled, as in this 9-second clip [10].

Next, follow these additional steps to disable MediaMax:

1. Select the SbcpHid driver from the Device Manager list and click "Properties" from the Action Menu.
2. Click the Driver tab and click the Stop button to disable the driver.
3. Set the Startup Type to "Disabled" using the dropdown list.


With the driver stopped, you can verify that the same applications copy every track successfully. Setting the Startup Type to disabled prevents MediaMax from restarting when the computer is rebooted. It will remain deactivated until LaunchCD.exe is allowed to run again.

Equivalently, executing the following commands from the Command Prompt will deactivate MediaMax:

net stop sbcphid
del %systemroot%\system32\drivers\sbcphid.sys

Consider other alternatives?

<_<
>_>

But yeah, it's getting extremely stupid.

When I put it on my computer I just disabled autorun. The music industry pisses me off sometimes.