Scan of copy protected Audio CD - (Cactus Data Shield 100)

Burning Software Copy Protection
#1

One of the great things with Audio CDs over music downloads is that you can buy second hand CDs, but you cannot legally buy second hand downloads.

Even though copy protection is supposedly a thing of the past with new audio CDs, this is not the case with second hand CDs, as I’ve just discovered with a recent used Audio-CD I bought for €2. I popped it in the PC and after a few seconds, the first song started playing like a badly tuned FM radio station. :confused:

So I thought, maybe it’s just covered in fingerprints, so I took it out, but it was totally clean below, not even a scratch. So I scanned it in Opti Drive Control: :eek:


Scan of David Kitt - Square 1
CD produced by Warner Music Ireland - 2003

The CD does not contain any mention of copy protection, however, upon a closer inspection, I saw that there was no sign of the CD audio logo anywhere on the inlet, jewel case or the CD itself, which is a tale-tale sign that it’s copy-protected, since copy protected CDs are not allowed to carry the Audio CD logo. I had a quick look around to try determining the copy protection and as far as I can tell, it’s Cactus Data Shield 100, as it does not contain a data track.

As I was determined to rip the CD to put on my MP3 plyaer, I tried an older DVD writer I have handy, the Lite-On SOHW-1693S and it was able to rip the audio fine without any noticeable noise in the audio, since some drives, especially Lite-On’s, replace the corrupt audio frames with interpolations of neighbouring frames to give a clean audio playback. The only drawback is that it’s difficult to get an accurate rip as the secure ripping options in Exact Audio Copy don’t work on this type of CD, since as the CD intentionally has C2 errors, it gets stuck as soon as it starts ripping.

#2

Do you have AnyDVD ?
If you do try EAC with AnyDVD running.

#3

I don’t have AnyDVD, however, I’m happy enough with the rip I got when I used the Lite-On drive, using EAC in burst mode.

I’m not critical about having perfect sound quality. As long as it sounds fine on my MP3 player, I’m happy. :slight_smile:

#4

Burst mode can really be useful sometimes. Pretty good for a badly scratched disc.
I don’t know if DVDFabs Passkey does anything fo Audio CD’s like AnyDVD does.
I bet you’ve already used the AnyDVD trial.
As long as your satisfied with the results no need to do more.

#5

I had one of those un-CDs scanned some time ago.

I am not sure, which drive I used to get a quality copy. Perhaps I should grab the disc and try again :slight_smile: For some reasons, I love my Renesas LG drives, especially my old 4163 :slight_smile:

Michael

#6

If that disc gets 1 scratch it will never play again! lol Treat it like “gold”! :iagree:

Sadly CU (E32) errors are hardware dependent via the drives firmware and how it handles them. The actual damaged frames will vary from drive to drive, some will also see an error in frames before and after actually having more errors then it should be :sad:

For me the best drives for CU (E32) errors have been Plextors, they pretty much see just the eronous frames.
CDS-100 damages 1 frame per block (they lowered this on 200) that’s 24 bytes per sector. They overwrite the audio w/ a “click” for 24 bytes, then flag the EDC to indicate it’s an error and then erase the ECC so it can’t be corrected. Drives will copy the click but fix the EDC/ECC and the result is clicks w/o an error when you burn it back. As I said some drives can’t handle the errors well and extend them.

My advice try to buy the CD in Redbook format, most of these discs have been reprinted.