My first encounter with a copy protected CD... and I am **** pissed off!
I went to look for the newly released Hail to the Thief by Radiohead. I found the dreaded copy protection notice on it, but after finding out that there were was no copy protection-free version available, at least for now in Mexico City, I decided to go on and give it a try... After all, there was a notice on the back that said it was compatible with PC, so I thought that if I couldn't somehow circumvent the copy protection, at least I would be able to play it on my computer normally.... WRONG!!!!
Since apparently I had to install some software to play it, I decided to proceed to the usual EAC ripping and see how it went before I even listened to it for the first time. Result: Silence and clicks... and at the end of the song, a hyper-speed version of the song... I was kind of expecting something like that to happen, so I didn't freak out and installed the included software in order to be able to listen to the CD on the computer drive... Listen??? LISTEN!?!?!?? Do you call listening exposing your eardrums to a 48 kpbs WMA GARBLE??? The first few seconds I thought that it might be some kind of Radiohead-like special effect, but NO! Damn, I am normally somewhat insensitive and tolerant to artifacts, but this is simply TOO much!!! The return policy of the shop, afaik, is only for intact CD in their wrapping and all, but I don't give a **** about it, I want my money back or I'll give 'em some ruckus alright!
Does any of you know how to rip such a CD?? It's the one with the circle-triangle-circle triangle one inside of the other... Or, alternatively, do any of you know if the version sold by Amazon is copy-protected? Or (to you German fellows) if the version sold in Germany is crappy-protected too (because I am going to Germany like in a month)? I wish I could get my hands on some FLACs of a good version, but that is hard stuff to find. I have my perfectly paid-for, legal (non-)CD in front of me, don't I have the right to listen to it wherever I please??? Bah, if everything fails, I'll just have to turn to my last-resort measure of asking a friend for his downloaded MP3s of the album...
Hail to the rights thieves...

~Dologan

Same copy protection here. You may want to buy the equipment to rip digitally from your cd player or a cd drive that bypasses much copy protection.

btw: The Album is out on Vinyl, too

Does anyone else find it ironic that the title of the CD is called Hail to the Thief?

Check your PM

This one is a doozy. On my drive, the tracks all show up correctly in EAC. First problem solved. Second of all, the drive gets what I believe are frequent bogus C1 errors, which can be corrected in secure mode. I made it a test+copy just to make sure, and half the tracks had mismatched CRCs. I just kept doing it till I got matching ones. They sound okay so far... think I got it. BTW, burst mode test+copy gave so many mismatches it's rediculous.

This takes well over 8 hours to rip BTW, with all the slowdowns and error correction bouts.

In other news, this disc has really audible clipping and the thing is compressed to high hell. Otherwise, good album. The record label gets a big middle finger though.

Actually, here in Germany the industry is very much pushing copy-protection for music CDs. I've read somewhere that labels seem to try out their protection systems here first.

Though I don't posses Radiohead's new masterpiece I'm afraid it is copy-protected here as well.

If you know some German you might want to check out c't CD-Register which is basically a list of all copy-protected CDs sold in Germany and which CD drives are able to rip/play it. The people there claim CDS200 is used for Hail to the Thief, so you should try a drive that is known to work with that kind of system.

c't CD-Register


Ingmar

I don't know if you did but, one of the things to try (on protected) CDs in EAC is "Detect TOC manualy". This might help in some cases.
--
Ge Someone

With my copy protected Massive Attack album I slowed down EACs extraction speed (using burst mode) to 4x (F10, Offset/Speed, speed selection). I could then Test & Copy with matching CRC's, on 4 rips. The speed selection tab isn't supported by EAC for all drives though.

some cd burners can rip copy protected cds. my lg 52x/24x/52x can rip copy protected cds with secure mode in eac, but it is damn slow, it took me one hour to test & copy the new emil bulls album.

The latest Ben Harper album has copy protection (it is the triangle, circle etc) Using CDex, Full Paranoia mode was able to rip the cd easily! Sounds great. My cd-rom is only about 6 months old as well.

Buy a Lite-on.

I just got my "Hail to the thief - Spec ed." and I tried ripping it here at work because I was curious. It has the circle with the triangle in it and it says "copy control". My Placebo CD had the same logo but ripped fine, it also had the crappy 48kbps files (sheesh!). I ripped that in another drive though. Anyway, with my LG 40x drive in secure mode it took ages to rip but the CRC was the same in both the read and the rip and the file sounded ok (not so sure about the quality of the mastering though!).

I ordered a Plextor Premium a couple of days ago, it will be interesting to see if it does any better.

I want to make it clear that I bought the original so I don't consider this illegal. I buy all the CD's I like. What I don't like though is that I pay to get a second rate copy which I can't play where I want. It only affects us who buy the CD too because I've already seen it on the internet...

Ironically, when I grew desperate with my Hail To The Thief album, I opened up up Windows Media Player and, laughed heartily when it allowed me to, hassle free, rip the album to lossless wma. I'll still give EAC another shot though. I just think it's funny that Microsoft beat this problem when in EAC, the disk didn't even show up on my DVD drive.

Edit: I just had to bold Microsoft because it's so funny!

Ha! Good work lh_sabre!

For the third time...

I managed to get a perfect ripped copy of Hail To The Thief with just my good old Plextor 12/10/32A and WinDac at 4x (which solves also that "9secs skip problem)...EAC crashed the first time I used it and didn't try again. So it is possible...maybe because of Plextor.

Edit: Here in Greece we also happen to have the Copy Control version

My copy of Radiohead's -Hail To The Thief ripped perfectly. Flawlessly. No errors, no copy protection, no whatever. Of course, maybe a copy protect version wasn't sent to border's bookstore in vermont.... Anyone else not having any problems with the ripping process of this cd. On the other hand, anyone else glad radiohead has actually let Johnny Greenwood pick up a guitar in this album?


Jeff

I'm pretty sure it has to do something with burners and their unique properties. Also, I'm pretty sure that it'd be nearly impossible to find a non-copy-protected version of this CD. What baffles me is that it's Radiohead. I guess artists just don't have control of their music in this capitalist-pig world .

On another note, I absolutely love this album. It's like a much better tuned version of Amnesiac.

I have no idea what it could be. Ya know, my wife buy a lot of mainstream cds & lately they've been popping up as being copy protected this-or-that & I've NEVER HAD A PROBLEM ripping any of them. No pops, no clicks, no garbled mess, no whines, backgroud noises, nothing. all I'm using is a teac 540e reader w/ EAC. Anyone else have as much success as I have? I've never had to do any of that crap like the mark on the cd, etc...

Jeff

Just as a curiosity, how many of the folks who seem to always rip copy-protected discs successfully have "Autorun" disabled in their systems? And how many of those who experience problems have autorun enabled? Don't know that it would make a difference with some of the new systems, but it couldn't hurt to check.

- M.

I picked up the Limited release of Hail to the Thief at my local BestBuy, Boston Area.
There was no indication of copy protection on the case/cd, the disc ripped without a problem. using EAC via my PX-502A drive.

-ty1er

Generally, most major releases in the US are devoid of copy protection..so far. Such as the new Massive Attack and Radiohead. They are all copy protected outside of the US.

Speaking of copy protection, there's a new one going around thats on many promo CDs and supposedly the new Marilyn Manson album called XCP from http://www.first4internet.co.uk/.

Major major pain. I still can't figure out out. All the tracks read as data files, no matter what program you use. It has a built-in player on the CD which works well, but makes it a pain. Trying TotalRecorder, it continues to play the track fine through the player, but then starts outputting garbage signals after 1 minute to TotalRecorder.

Oh, the pain

Hi,

I have got it and successfully ripped it.

Using a Lite-On 24x CD/RW which is well known for it's ability to copy copy protected CD's, I then copied the CD using Elby's Clone CD to copy it, I then put it on a CDR and copied it using dBpoweramp with Rip to Ram and it's worked perfectly.

I'm using it enoded to MP4 128k, on my iPod now

Craig

Just curious, could you play it on a standard component CD player, and run the digital coax/optical output into a soundcard with a digital input, thus getting an exact copy.

Just trying to plan ahead :-)

Welcome to the wonderful world of buying prebuilt damaged audio cd's.

Radiohead Hail to the Theif ships prebuilt with over 1300 errors that can't be corrected, but have to be interpolated. While ripping the darn cd isn't an issue, I hereby present to you the real crime, caught by a C1/C2-test with the Plextor Premium:

http://www.stoffersphoto.com/mixed/radiohead.gif

Please read this thread in the same issue with Massive Attacks latest (and compare the sheer amount of errors):

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....T&f=20&t=10310&

Let me just remind you that your hi-fi CD Player will hate this record also.

Yes, this is exactly what they want, to kill the "backup friendly" CD format so they can push more "copy control friendly" formats like DVD-A or SACD. Or, have you not figured out their scheme already?

Just think that analog 1x records could probably take less time, and then they will watermark, heh... Everything is easy to defeat tho, if the people ignore their treats and keep using the CD format, or better, a customer designed CD, could be some lossless audio compression format inside data discs of sorts. Its just a matter of people agreeing together, after all, there are some designing VCD like formats for mpeg4 video and variants... Why not design a better customer CD audio standard?

Just think, lossless inside of data discs, it could even support 24/96...
You people just have to bypass the industry, as it happened in 96-97 with the mp3 format.

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

Btw, I found a way to get the audio data from the CD hassle-free in three easy steps...

1. Used CloneCD to make an image file (Audio CD profile) of the CD, 2. mounted the image on VirtualClone Drive, 3. Ripped the image using EAC.

This was but a partial success. While I was able to play the real audio data on the CD and not the 48 kpbs WMA crap, there was a problem with the two first songs. The first one doesn't start playing until shortly before the third minute and is truncated, while the second starts playing part of the first one, truncates it and starts playing the second one, which ends normally.... I thought a manual TOC detection could solve the problem, but the Virtual Clone Drive can't do it right (manual TOC detection results in blank page)
On the other hand, after seeing the screenshot stoff provided, it is clear to me that doing the "actual" rip with CloneCD is letting all those errors go unnoticed and uncorrected. Right now I can't do a proper listening on proper equipment and proper environment, although here in my lab with all the fans and noise there is, it sounds alright (there is no way it could sound worse that the WMA, anyway).
I will see if creating an image with another CloneCD profile (Multimedia Audio CD or Data CD, maybe) helps with the problem of the two first tracks. Later I will try to see if I can somehow make a proper rip with EAC by using the marker trick (the CD has two sessions, although I can't see them clearly on the CD surface though).
Anyway, thank you all for the ideas. I would like to buy a LiteOn, but right now I'm stuck with my laptop's Toshiba combo drive.

~Dologan

Get ClonyXXL and find out what kind of copy protection it uses. I discovered my 3 CD-RW drives easily read key2audio protected ones, but not cactus data shield 100.

It is CDS200, if I recall correctly.

Piece of cake for my LiteOn AND for my Generic DVD-ROM drive, which sometimes fails ON NORMAL CDs! (it is getting a little tired, I presume)

So now I am enjoying my freshly made MP3s of the album...

I normally don't have problems ripping copy protected CD's because with plex tools you can make the drive read the first session only. Which works perfect for almost all copy protected CD's but with the Madrugada CD Grit I always get gliches at the exact same positions (I reripped about 4 times) even though I'm using EAC's secure mode. Has anybody an idea what might cause this and how to fix it, it's really starting to annoy me

Cactus Data Shield 200...

I have ripped all of them to MPC already with my nice LiteOn 52327S.

But I found a problem recently...

I use EAC test & copy to make sure the test & read CRCs match, and yes they do match.
But the CRCs of 2 test & copy attempts of the same track does not match, though the tracks still sound fine.

Also, I think that the method of "rip to CloneCD first" is not good because you don't know if the rip is successful or not when you do the CD -> Image convertion, and the use of EAC to rip and image afterwards becomes meaningless.

Heres a couple places of info to answer many of all of your questions.
Digital-Inn EAC forum - Cactus Data Shield 200

& Club CD Freaks - How to recognize and copy-rip protected audio cds

If a person had a Plextor I seem to recall PlexTools ripping these discs better then EAC.
EAC has some command line switches built in. You will have to get into dos with start > run > cmd.exe for Win NT4-2003
For Win98 use start > run > command.com (I think, sorry its been years ) then navigate to for example CD "C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy" then type eac.exe -nomultisession shortly after EAC will launch. (be sure to leave the doublequotes surrounding the path when changing directories) What this does is doesn't allow but the 1st session to be read.
Unfortunately it doesn't work with all drives. Doing a search on google for disable multisession would probably have a utility that will also disable the 2nd session from being recognized. Also ripping as slow as possible will usually help to.

You also may have to experiment a bit and try various things I mentioned to find the right combination & I'm sorry this is written rather poorly, I've been up for 24 hours.

Best wishes, Tec
Btw, Cactus 100 can be defeated in part with using a DVD-Rom as the drive.

I recently purchased an imported copy of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells 2003 and this also contains the CDS200 protection scheme. I was able to rip it in EAC using my DVD rom drive, after doing a little trick. Apparently these copy protected CDs have a false TOC implemented so that if you are lucky enough to have a drive that can even see the disc, the TOC shows the WMA files instead of the real audio (which it sees at the end as one or two data tracks). If this is the case with anyone, go to Action/TOC alteration/Detect TOC Manually. I did that, the real audio tracks showed up fine and I was able to rip the disc without too much trouble at all. I don't remember what brand my DVD drive is, it's just a generic one I picked up at a computer show a couple of years ago.

@alkabrecka
I have a small question regarding Tubular Bells 2003.
In the 11. song - "finale" i can hear very tiny clicks
from the second 5.03 to 5.04 just before Cleese says
"Mandolin". I get these clicks with the original in my Marantz
Cd-Player and in the rips from my Asus CD-Rom or Yamaha burner.
Can you please check this part. I want to know if it is in the
master or this F* CDS200.

Wombat

I bought Hail to the Thief. No copy protection on mine. Worked fine in EAC.

Of cource you're in Mexico City and I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the USA.

Are you sure it's cds200? I didn't think they had that clicking-thing on the 200, only on cds100. I resently ripped a cd that had cds200, and I know it was because it said so on the backside, but there where no clickingerrors put in the music deliborately. But I had to use clonecd to rip it, eac showed only datatracks. And the start and stop-points for the songs was screwed up, so I had to fix it manually.

By the way
frozenspeed wrote

I use a teac 540e, and it wasn't that easy to rip cd with cds200. But it rips key2audio cd easily.

I might gonna check out alkabrecka's method with my dvd drive

@loke
CDS200 seems the reason for lots of C1 Errors. Another
scratch on the CD and you´ll have uncorrectable errors.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Articles/S...eries=0&index=7

Thats why i wanted to know if the tiny clicks on tubular
bells on this position are there on other originals or it
is my media that´s gone to hell.

Since alkabrecka doesn´t check this, is there anybody else in here
with the original TB and can do a quick listening?


Wombat

I ripped Radiohead's Hail To The Thief with Easy CD-DA Extractor. It took a couple of tries but it worked.

I'll have to try that "detect TOC manually" in EAC though because I prefer EAC by far.

As CDS-copy protections do not irritate the drive try one of the following steps:

1) detect toc manually
2) do not use secure rip (I don't like it to give this tip but as there is a copy-protection this might help)
3) use CDex (maybe before choice 2; sometimes CDex extracts CDs EAC fails at)
4) use Alcoholer with Alcohol 120% or Clone CD
5) try opening your image with isobuster
6) load your image into an audio-editor like CoolEdit and ... have a choice
7) share some files with pl who also have that CD, quite legal as we know

best wishes - sPeziFisH