This is really annoying... The cd will play fine on my stereo, but as soon as I try to play the CD on my PC, the sound has little 'blips' in it - annoying as hell!
The blips occur using standard CD playback, and Digital Audio Extraction (QCD)

They are also present using CDex's cdparanoia mode to rip wavs...

Anyone have any info on emi's latest copy protection?

There are lots of discussions here about copy protection. I'll try and sumarise:

Use EAC (I can't comment on CDex having not used it).

1st, try Secure mode.

2nd, try Burst mode using a slow read speed.

This isn't new... I had something like this on 1994 'Pink Floyd - The Division Bell' CD.
It seems that synchronization patterns are removed on some sectors,
which makes normal CD players interpolate - my Lite-On burner rips/plays it with neither errors nor interpolation,
my old Hitachi GD-2500 drive inserted blanks (it played okay analog - EAC detected errors, but couldn't correct them),
my brother's drive featured nasty clicks in both ripping (even with EAC) and playback.

What is this copy protection called?

Don't know, it isn't advertised on the CD or the box.
I'd call it 'b0rken blocks protection'.

Download ClonyXXL, and find out what the copy protection method is called.

What does "blip" mean exactly ?
If they are clicks, the only thing to do is record the playback from your hifi with your soundcard. They can be more or less strong according to the drive, but never as quiet as on a hifi player, unless recent drive have improved since the ones I tested ( http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=11504 , http://perso.numericable.fr/~laguill2/dae/dae.htm ).
I think I'll have a look at CDRinfo.com and suggest them to test drives for Cactus clicks if they don't already.

ok... ClonyXXL Identifies the protection as Cactus 200.0.4-4.1 build 2a. My DVD drive shows up the songs as all data tracks and they are all 10 secs long., while my CD-RW drive shows the correct length.

@Pio2001: Yep, these are clicks, and always in the same place.

Any known workarounds...

Within EAC you can:

Action > TOC Alterations > Detect TOC Manually

This should fix that problem.

What country was this CD from? If I remember correctly Radiohead's HAIL TO THE THIEF was copy-protected pretty much everywhere other than the US.

--Nathan

It just needs such CDs to fall into the hands of the Authors of CD ripping programs, only recently have the blips in the audio stream been present, upto now it has been fudged TOCs (which can be got around IF your CD drive firmware will rip where it is told, some will not).

I am on the look out for such a CD - this type of protection can be overcome I am 99% sure.

I wrote here before about an Asus CDS500A to be good...
At work i have lots of different drives to play with and
this is the only i had that is able at full speed to do this.
Every Cactus CD(200) i ripped with EAC Secure gave me no clicks
at all! There is only Tubular Bells 2003 with tiny clicks
on a special part i asked to check back by another member of
this forum but got no feedback at all, so i think it is in the master.
It seems to interpolate pretty well and is only a few bucks on ebay.

Wombat

The protection could be overcome with good C2 support, then interpoling in software.
It would be interesting to know how much samples the Asus can interpolate.

EDIT : but nothing can be done about mastering errors that can't be corrected because of the protection destroying error correction codes. See and hear http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=11504

I bet i can´t check this! But maybe someone else can?

Wombat

This is the Australian edition, comes with DVD.



I sure hope so...

Just checking out some of the fine print on the back of the CD, It has a little copy control section where it is claimed that no playback problems will be encountered on any equipment.

I bought my first Protected CD, EMI too.

Sarah Brightman's Harem. Only because 20 euros for CD and DVD was a fair price.

To rip it I could use PlexTools, but I want to use EAC for MP4 encoding.

So in fact, I launch PlexTools set to see only the first session, let it open in the taskbar, then I launch EAC.

No special maneuvers in EAC, since it sees the CD as a regular one with this trick.

But I can't stop been LMAO with my Mac. I've a G3 under MacOS X with a TRAXDATA CDRW in place of the CD-ROM reader.

I put Harem in it. iTunes started and identified the CD correctly, all tracks were readable (and encodable).

Toast couldn't see the tracks. I was quite puzzled there.

But I simply right clicked (Ctrl-click) on the Harem CD icon, chose "Copy" then I right clicked on the desktop and chose "Paste" and boom, all the tracks were transferring on the desktop. (w00t) (I know I could have used "Duplicate")

The files were OK, I only had 1 click on the first track,and the Mac was ripping at full speed. I think it would have been better at lower speed.

A friend of mine tried it with an external FireWire burner. He had more success than with the SuperDrive. But couldn't still rip fully.

Well, I was lucky. And still LMAO.

Wombat I have a copy of the CDS200 protected version of Tubular Bells 2003. What part are you hearing clicks in? I haven't noticed any in my rip.

Hello alkabrecka,

i asked before here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....pic=10346&st=25

It is in "Finale", the 11th track. Very tiny clicks, best heard with
headphones in the seconds 5.03 to 5.04 just before Cleese says "Mandolin".


Wombat

Krazy:

Just checked - this CD is not copy protected in my country, so I can cut you a deal - you send me your copy protected CD and I will send you an unprotected CD?

What country are you in?
I will gladly send you a CDS200 protected CD.
Emi/Virgin has started protecting all their CDs in Mexico.

It would have to be a specific one that has audiable errors inserted into the audio stream, I have DataShield CDs with just TOC fudges.

I've been fooling around with two CDS200 protected discs, Robbie Williams - Escapology and Phil Collins - Testify. Some conclusions can be found here: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....topic=9632&st=0

I stated there that I couldn't hear any problems. On better evaluation, there were some minor audible effects, however. Yet, no obtrusive clicks, just very mute "blob"s in the background. And I only found them after ripping a couple of times and seeing different samples in each rip... I then listened very closely to those parts, and noticed the "blob"s. They're obviously not part of the music, but I'd never notice them without knowing on forehand.

Funny thing: Escapology has a silent part of 10' in the last track, with a hidden track after that. There's one such "blob" in the silence.

I'm afraid that those "blobs" may still be there even if the 2 ripped WAV files of the same track are equal.

I'm not sure if this is possible (I don't don't how CIRC works)... I don't know if this would mean that there's no drive able to extract without those noises (inaudible or almost inaudible to me).

@Patsoe

The plops seem to be the rest of interpolated bad data, otherwise
there would habe been clicks at this position. Some declicking software
works this way and leave plops.

Wombat

Wombat Sorry about not posting a reply in the original thread, after I posted I didn't have the opportunity to check back to the thread for a while and I forgot about it. Anyways, I just listened to the part you described and all I heard was a small pop just before he says "Mandolin" but I think that is coming from a guitar or bass, just that pop you get when a string is played hard. I will try to provide a sample later tonight when I have more time.

No Problem alkabrecka. After listening again it sure may
be the sound of a plectrum. What makes me wonder it isn´t
there in the rest of the song.

Wombat

It's the same protection that came on Radiohead's Hail to the Thief and Placebo's Sleeping with Ghosts.

All 3 ripped fine (eventually) using EAC on my LiteOn 16x DVD-ROM. Errors every 2 or 3 seconds though, so it's a slow rip.

Well, AFAIK, "Hail to the Thief", Blur's newest, Placebo's all have the kind of protection that introduces errors in the data stream, as well as TOC tricks.
These CDs are widely available in Mexico.
PM me if you are interested.

Disable C2, anyway, these CDs have a completely messed up C2 layer.

@AtaqueEG

you have PM

ClonyXXL doesn't detect any protection on my Pink Floyd audio CD.
I'm nearly sure there is one (CD is in very good condition)

I can't read the CD properly with C2 even with my LiteOn burner, but in normal mode it does work and CRCs match.
I haven't found any interpolation with this drive, while my Sony CD player had interpolated at error places. (inaudible)

With the other two drivers I've tried with both C2 on and off...

@spoon:

Thanks, but that's OK. The CD was a present, so I don't really want to go swapping...

Aha!!

Doing a bit of google-ing on Cactus Data Shield 200 turned up a couple of articles mentioning that DVD drives were better at reading Copy protected CD's than many CD-ROM's. My problem was that while my CD-ROM drive showed the tracks with their correct times, the DVD was showing 10 sec per track.
However using EAC's manual TOC detection I was able to get the correct times using the DVD drive, which I then used to rip the CD. I haven't listened to the whole album, but so far this seems to have eliminated the annoying clicks!


An Interesting Article B)