October 20, 2005

An audio CD is just an audio CD after all

Posted at October 20, 2005 10:56 PM in Personal , Technology .

Last fall I ranted up and down about copy protected audio CDs, and how I couldn't rip the tracks off of a copy-protected audio CD to mp3. I have since learned that there's a really easy solution: don't allow copy-protected CDs to auto-play. It turns out that the copy protection software is loaded when the CD auto-plays (they are hybrid audio / data CDs) and if the CD never auto-plays, the copy protection software isn't installed. The CD drive then sees only the audio portion, just like a regular CD player. Nice, huh?

Unfortunately, I haven't found anything about what to do if you already let a CD auto-play and the protection is already installed. :( Good thing I reformatted since that incident and learned this trick before I got another copy protected CD!

Comments

I used ISOBuster (http://www.smart-projects.net/">) on the latest 30 Seconds To Mars CD. Worked like a charm. -=)

And yes, the shareware version was enough to extract the needed data.

Posted by Ooklah at October 21, 2005 04:16 AM
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