Hi all,

Just bought 'Groove Coverage - God Is A Girl', the Maxi CD. When I wanted to rip it MP3 to play on my Nomad, EAC gave me a very weird TOC: It says that track 1 (an audio track which plays fine on a standard cd player) is a DATA track???

Tracks 2 to 5 are reported as audio tracks (which is normal). So I guess in this new copy protection the audio tracks are surrounded by data tracks now. I've unleashed Isobuster at the cd but it really doesn't help, it rips it as a bin or a tao file... When you try to burn the bin file with Nero it says it will burn it as one large audio file and then produces nothing but garble...

Any ideas on how to make EAC or another program rip this first track as a wave file? If it doesn't that's the last CD I ever bought from Universal! I don't even intend to share my files on the Internet, I just want to play them on my Nomad...

Thanks!

Have you tried using the newest ClonyXXL version to scan the CD? Might help you figure out what kind of copy protection is on the disc...

If you could play it on normal CD Player. I think you can playback with winamp? How about using Winamp Disk writer Output, then it would be a wave file! But it wouldn't be as accurate as EAC programs.

@kjempen
Well ClonxyXXL hangs... tried a few times, no go, it freezes. Thanks for the hint though.

@kotrtim

Don't work. You see, it is recognised by the pc as a DATA cd, and not as an audio cd...

This is very weird, the first track is the key... It contains audio but somehow is recognised as data.

Well closer inspection of the CD itself revealed that actually the first track is a merge of a DATA and audio track. Regular CD players don't see the data thing so they jump to the audio part immediately. CD-Rom's however get all confused because this first track contains both Audio & data, but they can't tell where starts which, so they just say it's a data track.

The 'theoretical' solution would be to rip the track RAW and cut off all the 'garbage' in front of the audio part with some editor. However I wouldn't have a clue on how to do that... That it is garbage in front of the track is clear, all programs that manage to read the first track disregard this 'garbage' and present the correct track length.

Any ideas? Developpers perhaps ?

I'm having a weird brain-fart. I'm no expert, so this may be a really stupid idea, but what about ripping to RAW, as you mentioned, then loading that into a WAV editor like CoolEdit Pro? (Can it be done?) I would think that the data portion at the beginning of the track would sound like white noise, and you could easily "hear" the beginning of the audio... just clip off the beginning.

Worth a shot, anyway...

ALL corrupt CDs should be returned for an uncorrupt CD or a refund.
This, really, is the ultimate solution.
When stores get tired of dealing with it, they will stop aquiring and selling corrupt CDs.

If i remember correctly i thought this problem was solved by disabling auto-start on the cd drive

Wanted to try that but can't find where in Windows XP... In W2k there was a possibility to diable 'auto insert notification', but can't find that in XP. You do't happen to know how I have to do this?

*Edit: found it, they actually place it better in XP *

Tweak-XP can do that!


edit: Spam removed. Better take a look at Tweak UI from the PowerToys for XP.

Hehe I totally forgot about the powertoys. Nifty little things they are .

Disabled autoplay, entered cd, launched EAC, still no go. CD-Rom sees 1st track as data track .

Oh another thing, I hooked up a regular cd player to my line in (I don't have SPDIF) and recorded the 1st track perfectly so their copy protection is not helping, if you want to copy something, it'll get copied... So in my opinion their schemes don't help anything, just piss off consumers and hurt your own sales. Cause I'm not buying anything from Universal anymore.

X-Setup, dont leave home without it
http://xteq.digitaldaze.com/products/xset/

You said you had nero but if you've got a copy of Cool Edit (the free version will do i guess) then create an image of the file using nero (change the burner to image drive in the options), then open this wav in cool edit with the following options.... 44100hz sample rate, Stereo Channels, 16Bit Resolution... on the next screen set the data format as 16-bit Intel PCM (LSB,MSB) and set the offset input data to 0. This will load the whole cd as a wav and hopefully the first track should be present.

Nero might freak i guess at copying it as an image and you might get garble... but its worth a try

Hey that did the trick! Thanks for the hint!!! There is only one problem: pops & clicks, indicating missing samples . Gotta find a way to get rid of those...

This new protection format is really weird, e.g. if you disable autoplay and rip a track with EAC (all tracks from the 2nd on are rippable) EAC goes crazy with rereads and rereads in Secure Mode, and produces a whole lot of garbage when doing Burst Mode. However, if you let autoplay do it's thing and let the little 'player' app from Universal play first, then stop it, launch EAC and rip from the 2nd track on, EAC does not freak at all and rips beautifully at it's normal speed . The same sh*t happens with CDex, IsoBuster and any other extraction program I have here. CloneCD also chokes...

There's also something else: EAC produces a 'unknown read command' on the first track, and all other rippers go crazy with Jitter Errors...

Anyway, I might be able to rip it in the end, but the heart of the matter stays the same: I am not buying anything from Universal anymore.