Copy protection on Roger Waters' Flickering Flame CD

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Beatlesfan03
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Copy protection on Roger Waters' Flickering Flame CD

Postby Beatlesfan03 » Mon Feb 27, 2006 12:36 am

Found a new copy of "Flickering Flame - The Solo Years Vol. 1" at Half Price Books the other day and was surprised to see on the lower right hand corner of the booklet - will not play on PC/MAC. The CD itself is an Australian import.

So curiousity got the best of me and I put it in the PC, all it does is spin my drive and make it appear that it is working when it's really doing a whole lot of nothing.

I thought copy protection on CDs was a fairly new thing. This disc is copyrighted 2002. Any ideas as to what sort of protection method is utilized on this disc? I'm not so much interested in finding a way around it as to finding out exactly what it is.
Craig

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Postby Rspaight » Mon Feb 27, 2006 9:15 am

It appears that title uses the lovely method of manipulating the error correction bits to prevent play on CD-ROM-based devices:

http://ukcdr.org/issues/cd/docs/celdion.shtml

This was common on European releases from that time period, and is really nasty, causing problems far beyond just preventing copies. It never ended up on many titles in America (we eventually got the much less problematic autorun-based schemes).

Ryan
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Postby Beatlesfan03 » Mon Feb 27, 2006 7:28 pm

Thanks for the link Ryan.

Though I must admit not being able to rip the Celine Dion referenced in the article isn't such a bad thing. :D
Craig

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Postby Baba O'Riley » Tue Aug 01, 2006 9:20 am


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Postby Crummy Old Label Avatar » Wed Aug 02, 2006 8:04 pm

Sounds like you have one of those discs that have the false data track after the CD content, designed solely to confuse ROM drives. ROM drives will always read the data area first, but if there's really nothing there, the disc will just spin around until the drive gives up and spits it out.

I have one of these. You just have to CAREFULLY mark over a bit of the "data" track with a black Sharpie to turn it back into a fully compliant redbook disc. You can also use a bit of masking tape, but I'd think that might throw the disc off balance.
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