STEP 1: (passed)
So you actually decide to be a good boy and buy a music album (that’s the legal action right there boys and girls, yep) for… let’s say $20. You go home, all happy and everything, open the case and see the shiny disk with something else written on it then the three letter combination “TDK” for once. Yay!
STEP 2: (passed)
Because you still have a lot of work to do you go to your computer, put your new CD in the CD-ROM drive and wait for Winamp to start playing it. You wait. You wait some more. Manually opening Winamp and selecting the CD does… well, nothing. Rien. Nada.
STEP 3: (in the middle of it)
You go nuts and hit your head against the keyboard (or desk if your keyboard is one of those expensive and très fancy wireless things with 68 additional command buttons on it) and wonder why you bought a CD that cannot be played on your computer while you do your work.
QUESTION:
How on earth can I rip a copy-protected music CD? I mean, all I can see in Explorer is a ****ty video and a wallpaper that is too small for my resolution anyway. Ugh.
I take it you’re using windows, the first thing you want to do is make sure the auto-run setting for the CD drive is turned off, then put in the CD, which of course does nothing. While the CD is in the drive open a command prompt window by typing cmd in the run dialog. Then you can switch to the CD drive and do the dir command to get all the filenames, armed with those you can copy them one at a time in wav format to the harddrive, then just use some other software to convert them over to mp3. Basically, DOS is too stupid to figure out what to do with the protection junk at the beginning so it just ignores it.
Remember while you’re doing this entire thing that borrowing a friends CD and making a copy is illegal, but if you own it good Luck
Shawn
btw, mods if this post breaks the rules, please let me know and I will be more than happy to remove it.
Dude, I wrote the whole story to avoid these kind of questions.
But yes. I bought the album (that’s what music CDs are called) in a real store with real money and everything.
whoah…u got ripped…if you bought from a store, and paid $20…then it doesnt even work, u should take legal action…u could get the whole store closed down…
Paradox, it isn’t working. All I can see in DOS are the videos and exe-files, but no music.
Go to a record store and look at some CDs. A lot of them have this sticker saying “cannot be played on PC/MAC”. The CD I have doesn’t have this sticker, but can be played in the car or any other music installation… as long as it’s not a PC. Only the “enhanced” portion of the disk can be viewed (trailers, other videos, whatever).
This happened to me yesterday! I had the Rooney CD! I made a copy but couldn’t just listen to it in Winamp, all that came up was the dag blasted files for the video and stuff. I’m gonna try the DOS thing, hope that works, but, Kajunku, you say it didn’t?
And when you wrote the part about what you see on the disc, I thought you were going to say it said TDK and it was burn that you bought haha.
Not sure which of us you meant. As for me, yah, the cd is fine in a regular cd player, and I burned it straight with Nero, that was no problem. And now that I think about it… I took the burned copy to work to listen to on the computer in the back there.
Okay I jsut figured out a few things. :sigh: I feel like a real idiot. I realized that WMP at work played it so I figured, why wouldn’t winamp? Turns out I just didn’t understand winamp well enough. I had previously been just going to add>dir>cd drive. this didn’t work with Rooney. I decided there MUST be a play>cd option, and I found it in the main file/options list. Then I wondered about ripping. I went to winamp.com and found out to go to library>devices>rip. It’s ripping now
Sorry about that. Buuuuut at least I learned something new.
Okay so now we just gotta figure out Kajinku’s problem…
Yeah well your talking about a $20 music cd that you can use.
Try paying $100 for a game that with the CD in the drive, the games copy protection kicks in and it becomes unplayable.
This on a computer with no copy/emulation programs ever installed on it.
Go and download a pirate no-cd crack, and the game works fine !
So since you can’t return software after you have opened it because they dont want ppl buying it, copying it, and returning it.
Your stuck with a $100 cd that is useless unless you resort to using pirated cracks.
If this was anything else, a toaster… Since it doesn’t work you would be allowed to return it. But not with software.
By law you are allowed to make back ups of your software, yet they make it so that you can’t, and in doing so screw over people who actually paid for it.
[ot]A lot of Ubisoft’s games are like that also vulcan. I heard Far Cry would not install on a drive that had write capabilities. While I can’t confirm that, my laptop is a combination DVD/CD-RW drive, so I wouldn’t have been able to play it there…even if my Radeon 9000 would have melted from all the details :)![/ot]
I heard Far Cry would not install on a drive that had write capabilities.
Havent heard that one yet? Both my drives are writers and Far Cry installs just fine. I havent tried ripping the cd’s so I dont know how strong their protection is?
<mild rant>
If Ubis online gaming registration/password thing wasnt so annoying to deal with, I’d probably play alot more Far Cry and Splinter Cell multiplayer.
go here www.audiograbber.com-us.net/ and get the shareware version (for free) which will allow you to rip any CD including protected ones into mp3 (which you can then listen to on your computer )
the only annoying thing is that with the demo, you can’t select all the tracks to rip at once (it’ll randomly select some) so you’ll have to quit and reload the program a few times to get them all…
also, if you have Nero (or maybe other burning apps too) you can just burn another copy which won’t be protected… that’s what we do to listen to them.
hey dude! glad you got it copied in the end.
just for the record though, another, very easy way to get around the copy protection is to just hold down the shift key before you put the cd in the drive and keep it held down for a few moments after the CD is in.
Got around no end of copied CD’s this way.
(Dont you just hate the way that the industry is restricting how we use music. I wouldn’t mind, but after paying good money for a product, you should be allowed to use it however you want!)
All I can see in DOS are the videos and exe-files, but no music.
