Placebo disc
I accidentally bought an album without noticing the “copy control” sticker on the cover. It was Placebo, which seems fitting: looks like the real thing, but isn’t. As a representative of Philips said, “Those are silver discs with music data that resemble CDs, but aren’t.” It seems to have ripped with no dramas, though.
There was something I read about recently online, that the head of Universal Music in Europe (or some such individual and company) admitted that most discs released in Europe with copy-control stickers actually AREN’T crippled. They only put the stickers on to deter people, but the discs copy normally.
I don’t know if the same is true of CCed discs released here in Australia, but I have even less intention than before of trying to find out. If I can’t score a non-CCed copy of an album I want then I have no interest in buying it. (Actually, if I’d known you were interested in that Placebo CD I could’ve copied it for you myself; I got a non-CCed promo of it from 2SER.)
james that was my view for a while but I now find I cant get a lot of the CDs I want that are real red book CDs. I have only had acfew CC CDs I couldnt copy tho.
The problem with CC’d CDs isn’t that you can’t copy them (often you can) — it’s that,
a) you can’t play them most of the time, and
b) even if you can, there’s an annoying irregular crackle
I’ve got a bunch of mp3’s ripped from a CC’d CD; they play fine, but every now and then there’s a crackly sort of sound that’s really distracting. I’d also swear the quality’s lower than mere bitrate would indicate, although it’s hard to explain why.
If you buy a CD that won’t copy to your Mp3 player I suggest downloading all the tracks off the net and waiting for the recording industry to come and attempt to lay the smack down on you.