Copy Control CDs

As a frequent CD buyer I'm surpised I haven't encountered one of these before but I purchased Avril Lavigne - Let Go which is a BMG CD which features 'copy control' technology and warns that it may not work on anything other than standard home players.

I have four cd players in my house, two cdrom drives, one dvdrom drive and a Philips CD player in my stereo. As expected the disc plays perfectly in the Philips player but does not work in the computer drives. Running under Windows 98 I am able to run the magic application which plays back what appears to be 126kbps windows media, but shows artifacts all over the place - probably because the cd has been so audio compressed before this starts.

Under linux things get more interesting, the disk mounts but none of the files that actually contain the music can be seen, and the magic application doesn't run under wine [at least not as shipped by RedHat 7.3]. Unmounting the disc gives the following results.

I'm not able to play the disc in either drive, however, with the following patch to cdparanoia [as shipped by RedHat 7.3, this is main.c in the source RPM]
1013c1013
<         exit(1);
---
>         //exit(1);
[this prevents cdparanoia quitting if you try and rip a data track] I'm able to rip the cd perfectly and burn out a now redbook compliant audio cd, which is exactly what I tried to purchase in the first place.

It appears the copy control is intended to force people to copy the disk before playing it - I confess that to me this seems to miss the point entirely.

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