Maybe I'm carrying coal to Newcastle, but today by surfing the net I found out an utility called AnyDVD (www.slysoft.com). I tried it just because being curious and voila: I tried three copy-protected CDs - Annie Lennox "Bare", Dido "Life For Rent" (both Key2Audio) and Sarah Brightman "Harem" (CDS 200). Without AnyDVD it showed in Explorer some players and nonsense-stuff. After using AnyDVD in Explorer appears right number of cda-tracks I tried copying with Easy CD-DA Extractor 6.5 BETA 1 and Dido finished in 5:36 mins. (11 tracks, 54 mins.). Tried on LITEON LTN486S. Those, who have problems with almost audio CDs should give it a try...

And were there clicks and pops in the ripped image?
I can rip CDS200 just fine, but there are very mute clicks.

I haven't time to listen deeply to the ripped wavs yet, but the first impression is great. I plan to play with it more during the weekend...

Clicks caused by Cactus Data Shield's pressed C2/CU errors depend on drives' error correction (chipset, firmware (?)). With a given drive some programs won't be able to extract audio at all, but those that succeed should give identical results (at least at the same ripping speed), unless there are additional errors (e.g. scratches).

Turning on the softwares jitter correction should fix the clicks and pops with any drive? Like in nero.

No. Unless someone writes a software that uses the CU errors (C2 errors in EAC terminology) reported by the drive for interpolating erroreous samples, clicks/pops depend only on the drive - software can't/won't do anything about them.

Well, Plextools (and maybe EAC up to 0.9 Beta 4) do exactly that kind of thing if the user wants to ...

The only advantage of AnyDVD is that copy protected CD's will be recognized due to the circumvention of TOC manipulations ... no more, no less.

BTW ... the use of AnyDVD is illegal in Europe since this tool's only purpose is to circumvent copy protections ... therefore, this thread might not cope with HA rules.

I would be illegal in US due to DMCA, but I'm not so sure it's illegal everywhere in Europe. In any case, the laws in question are still highly controversial (and IMHO pure nonsense), and subject to be overturned due to being unconstitutional in most countries. So I'm not going to spontaneously remove the link.

AFAIK, it's illegal in Germany. But in France. For now...

-ec

I agree that we would need some definiten supreme court's judge decision whether AnyDVD can be defined as "simple means" or not

According to new EU copyright laws, AnyDVD's working principle (as an intermediate system driver for on-the-fly copy protection/encryption removal) and my (I agree, rather personal) definition of european law.

By the way, AnyDVD is distributed from the carribean area by some company called "SlySoft" which is nothing more than the german company "Elborate Bytes" - as a side note ... "CloneCD" is available from SlySoft as well

If AnyDVD and CloneCD were perfectly legal, there would be no need for Elaborate Bytes to found a subsidary in a law-free area (regarding copyright violations) ...

BTW ... the new EU copyright laws are nonsense in my opinion as well ... and there is no working link that points to this program.