CD “Protection”

4 June 2005 15:21:08

I bought my first “Protected” CD today from Best Buy. I had heard the VanZant Brothers “Help Somebody” a few months ago while it was getting pre-release radio time and loved it. Today I had the chance to go pick up the CD and was looking forward to importing it into my library as I do every other CD and being able to listen to it at my leisure around the house.

It played fine in my truck’s disc changer, but when I put it into my XP machine, all I got was a folder full of DAT files, etc. I usually use an older version of MusicMatch (that I paid for) to rip my CD’s into MP3’s because it was before all the digital rights garbage. MusicMatch didn’t even recognize the CD as a playable disc. I was a little weirded out, but I figured iTunes would certainly at least let me play the CD. Nope. No luck there either. I haven’t tried playing it in Windows Media Player, because frankly, I hate the application.

This predicament got me a bit upset. I just paid $15 for a CD I can’t listen to on my own computer! We have a few other machines around the house, so I figured it would be nice if one of them would play the disc. I started on a very up-to-date Linux box that found the disc, but wouldn’t play it either. Then I tried out a Mac running OSX and at least got to see the protected audio files, but nothing else.

Time to call in the reserves. A quick search on Google lead me to a site that showed me how to get to the actual audio tracks (which are located on a separate session on the disc) and then how to one-by-one copy those tracks to my PC and rip them into MP3’s.

Basically, I got to where I wanted to be, but it took an extra 2 hours to get there.
What does this mean? To me it makes me wonder why I purchased the music in the first place. I paid for the right to listen to this CD as I wish. I’m not copying it to distribute to others, I’m not stealing it. There are always those out there who just download the music for free. I have never supported or agreed with that method of acquiring music, but why should I spend two hours decrypting something I purchased when I can get it for free? If this is the way the music industry wishes to conduct itself, then I may find myself not paying for music any longer. I may just have to get it through other channels. Maybe the Industry will listen to us and change their poor ideas of “protection” but probably not.