I bought the digitally remastered version of Brian Eno: Ambient 4: On Land today and discovered that it’s copy protected. It’s the first time I’ve bought a CD with a warning imprinted that it might not be able to play on my CD-player:
On some equipment for example car CD players playback problems may be encountered.
In fact EMI is not entitled to entitle the product a CD as it’s not in compliance to the CD standard).
What a turnoff!
Slightly annoyed I inserted it into my TiBoox Mac running OS X.10.3.6 to see how many ways I’d manage to copy the tracks and how long it would take.
- First attempt: Open iTunes and import as mp3 or AIFF. Both works.
- Next try importing audio from CD in Peak. Works.
- The CD mounts on the desktop as two volumes one of them named Audio CD. Double-clicking it opens a folder with all 8 tracks displayed as AIFF. Copy and dragging them to the desktop turns out to be a fast way of ripping the CD….
- Final attempt: Starting Roxio Toast. A plain forward disc copying would copy the first session only (the useless volume of the disc). However Copy Image files works fine: Drop the Audio CD volume onto Toast save as an disc image unmount the CD and burn the disc image to an empty CD-R.
And yes in Norway it is perfectly legal to make copy for your own use.
What is this ridicoluous scheme good for? The only thing EMI might achieve by this stupid and non-working copy protection scheme is to destroy the car CD player of its customers.
Besides it’s a strange paradox to encounter this copy protection scheme on a record made by the artist that also created My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
