What is it with these copy protected 'CDs'? Wifey bought Dido's 'Life
for Rent' a week ago from Smith's, and tried to play it in the car on
the way back from the shops. No go, her Golf's CD player wouldn't even
look at it.

When she got home, I tried it in my car CD player (erm, a Volvo, since
you ask) and again, it's a no go. So far, that's 0 out of 2. I took a
look at the label, and guess what? It's not a Red Book disc. It has some
weird heiroglyphs on the back that (sort of) tell you that it will only
play a low bitrate version of the music on PCs, it might not play on
Macs at all, and 'others' are '100%' supported. Oh good, I think.

I tried it in the cheapo Tosh 330 DVD player (the one the kids can get
to) and that spat it back at me. 0 out of 3. The million year old
Marantz CD52 didn't have a problem with it.

Since it was 'copy protected' I thought I'd have a look at it on a PC. I
put it in the DVD burner, said "get stuffed" to BMGs kind offer of
installing some player software on the PC, and fired up EAC. Eleven
minutes later there are a dozen or so perfectly formed .wav files sat on
my hard disc. Some copy protection that is.

Then I tried it on wifey's PC. Seventeen minutes later, Musicmatch
jukebox had made me a nice set of mp3 files, without a glitch in sight.
The same story with my laptop.

So the story is, three out of four legitimate players failed completely
to get a tune out of this disc, but all the PCs I tried had no problems
at all making very nice (i.e. perfect) copies of the data. This is meant
to be copy protection? Don't make me laugh.

I fired off a stroppy email to BMG, explaining this situation. They
replied within three hours saying that they were aware of "a few"
instances where these discs would fail to play in cars, and if I sent
them my address they would forward me a reply paid envelope in which I
could return the disc, and get a "different" copy that would play in my
car... once they had verified it was a legit UK version. This begs the
question, why do they need to have a "different" version available?
Surely not just for the "few" people that can't play it in their cars?

It's dumb. The only people that this inconveniences are the legitimate
customers. Pirates wouldn't even raise a sweat getting a perfect copy of
this onto Kazaa, it's just too easy. I have no problems buying my music,
but it needs to work properly. This just doesn't. BMG are in my ****
list. I don't care who is on their label, they ain't getting my money.

Rant over.


--
Regards,
Glenn Booth