Buyer Beware - Perverted CDs

Buyer Beware - Perverted CDs -- MacinTouch passes along a warning from one Paul Sofronoff about non-standard CDs from EMI...

"I couldn't find any reference on your site to the EMI Copy Protection Disks that are now on sale in Europe, Canada and Australia. I understand they have recently started to be sold in the US and that may prompt more discussion. The bottom line is that these disks are NOT compact disks. They are modified disks and accordingly do not contain the Compact Disk logo. What they are is a pain in the proverbial. With one of these disks:

1. You may not be able to play it in all compact disk players - particularly portable disk players and car players with skip protection.

2. You may not be able to play it on your computer - windoze or mac. The format only supports certain systems, disk drives and systems. On my flat screen iMac the disk simply will not play.

3. If you can play it on your computer, you get an inferiour sound quality - the copy protection software requires that you play through the EMI player on the disk which uses a low bit rate sample.

4. It follows that you cannot rip your disk to iTunes as MP3s or AACs. ITunes just hangs and you have to kill it.

5. You cannot listen to the music you paid for on your iPod.

6. Naturally, you cannot copy the disk using diskburner or Toast.

The disks are sold in the same stores as real compact disks with minimal warnings on the packaging. IMHO the warnings should be in big neon lettering. There are also suggestions that EMI is gagging retailers from pointing out the limitations of these disks: [www.itsecurity.com]

There is apparently a hack for Windows users who want to bypass the copy protection, but as far as I am aware nothing for Mac users who as per usual will get less compatibility from EMI in the first place. The Radiohead Hail to the Thief CD I bought recently is ONLY compatible with Windoze. A more recent EMI disk does say it is compatible with Mac OS 9 with CarbonLib and OSX but as above I could not get it to play.

I am not a pirate and I buy something like 50 CDs a year. I put them on my Mac and my iPod - that is how I listen to MY music. I won't be buying ANY EMI CDs. [...] Strikes me that with the one step forward of iTunes, we take two steps back when the big companies just don't get it!"

I'm not a pirate either; my 17GB of mp3s and AACs are ripped from CDs I own or from Apple's iTunes Music Store (soon to be available for Windows). I'll continue to do so.

I don't buy the arguments for peer-to-peer music sharing, but I won't buy crippled CDs from EMI either.