Excessive Copy Protection?, Mp3 related Options

[Dub45]

This may be old news to some of you but its the first time that I have come across it.

I have just bought a copy of 'Round about Roma' by Stefano Di Battista on Blue Note.
This disc does not seem to have been released in the US yet.

I put it into my pc to have a listen while I browsed and suddenly a player that I had never seen before appeared! Anyways the cd provides its own player but apparently will not allow me to use my usual player to rip it as I usually do for use on my ipod.

When I opened the cd through explorer it does not display the audio tracks separately.

This is infuriating (I dont share MP3s on the net and I don't download them) but I can't listen to an album that I have bought as I would wish!

I presume the introduction of the player is to get over the complaints of cds not being playable on pcs.

Any other incidents of such cds? What are other people's views?

Incidentally I tried to copy it on a 'normal hi-fi type copier and it wont copy either!

[theduke]

The player will most likely play compressed files (lossy of course), not the actual WAV files.

It will do so with 99.9% certainty. I have heard of such CDs and none has ever played back the original WAV files. Instead there is a second session on the CD which contains protected files like WMA and the included player can decode them.