Copy-Protected CD's From '89 and '96?

Don Symes asks: "In ripping my CD library (MP3c -> cdparanoia -> bladeenc), I've run across a couple of CDs that, when played as MP3s, produce a white noise "fet-fet-fet-fet" at about 2 to 3 pulses a second. The CDs in question are Ani DiFranco, _Ani DiFranco_, Righteous Babe Records, 1989; and Israel Philharmonic, _60th Anniversary Gala_, RCA, 1996. Are these early examples of copy protected CDs, or an encoding artifact/settings issue?" Has anyone else found rip-proof CDs in there collection that exhibit this behavior? Has anyone successfully ripped any of the problem CDs listed, either here or in the comments (if so, what did you have to do)?

Is it you?

[Mello]

I've ripped every Ani CD at 260 with no problems or odd sound artifacts.

In fact every Ani CD says right on it "Unauthorized duplication, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing." Which while not an allowance for ripping, certaining doesn't sound like an RIAA lock-down.

*shrug*

Re:Is it you?

[discoinferno]

I agree with Mello. I had no trouble turning all my Ani cd's into mp3s. I'd take a look at your ripping method to find the problem.

bad CDs

[ameoba]

It sounds to me like you're talking about the noise that CDParanoia introduces when working with scratched CDs that it can't repair. Perhaps it could handle it a bit more gracefully, but that's what you get.

Re:bad CDs

[Pogue Mahone]

Try ripping using your CD writer drive. I have a CD that has a small visible blemish that causes one track to be unplayable on most CD players, and caused my PC's DVD drive to go apeshit. However, ripping from the CD writer using cdparanoia and the ide-scsi emulation produced an error-free copy.

Doubt it

[Outland Traveller]

If you read the fine print on Ani's "Righteous Babe Records" CDs you will see that they are quite permissive with regard to copying.

It is highly unlikely that these CDs would be part of any CD-based copy control scheme.

Bit-rot and bad CDs.

[Deagol]

There are several known cases where CDs had errors introduced in production.

In my own collection, for example, I have a copy of Enya's The Celts, from 1987. The errors may span more than one track, but you can hear the "skipping" type sound very clearly in the track "I Want Tomorrow", which is unfortunately amplified in the ripping process (I use paranoia).

This has been a hot topic in the Enya newsgroups in the past, and I'm not sure if it was ever decided whether it was a pressing problem or a mastering problem.

Fortunately, that album was re-mastered and re-released in the mid-to-late 90's, sans the aforementioned flaws. If any other Enya geeks actaully have the 2 to compare side-by-side, please comment on the quality, as I haven't bought the newer release (and I love "I Want Tomorrow"!).

Also, I think the age of the CD has something to do with it. I have an import copy of Queen's Greatest Hits, and the surface is visually perfect, yet I simply cannot get good rips on about 4 or 5 songs. If I use paranoia's -z (--never-skip) option, it never gets through the entire CD. I picked this album up in Germany around 1992.

Bladeenc is l4m3r than Lame

[death_denied]

Have you ever tried to use something other than bladeenc? It seems that the faults are in the mp3's rather than in the CD audio, try listening to the wav files and tell us if you hear any artifacts. The mp3 format has some strange frequency distortions above 16khz so you might also want to look into that. If you do want to make mp3's, please use Lame or not-Lame. Bladeenc is inferior to everything else by such a wide margin (its amoung the slowest encoders and it produces mp3's with some VERY noticable artifacts).

Try this

[Anonymous Coward]

Copy the tracks to your hard drive with Exact Audio Copy [exactaudiocopy.de], then rip the .wav files.

It may not be copy protection

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a story a while back about older CDs succumbing to a fungus [rense.com] that corroded the media.

Bad news.

Your CD is out of whack

[billcopc]

The answer is simple enough : those fet-fet noises are the result of an unreadable area on the disc. It might be a nasty scratch, or sometimes just the disc itself might have a few production flaws that go unnoticed on a stereo, yet crop up with cd-roms.

One thing I'd try is to find a good old Panasonic-Matsushita 24x cdrom drive and try ripping it on that. Why the Panasonic ? Because it is quite probably the best drive for ripping that I've ever used. It will automatically slow down when it encounters an error and retry until it gets the bits out of there, unlike today's cdroms that just run right past it and say "Did we just hit something ?".

I've managed to save many badly damaged cd's with that drive, taking a seriously beaten up disc that constantly skips and burning the ripped data onto a new disc where you could barely hear the aforementioned fet-fet noise in the worst areas. It was also quite fast for its generation, ripping at a good constant 10-12x.

it might be the drive....

[guinsu]

I have had problems like that with certain CD's in my old Memorex CD-R, it couldn't rip R.E.M's "Automatic for the People". But then I got a plextor and it ripped ok.

Error correction ripping software?

[hawkstone]

The big question -- did you rip to uncompressed (.wav) files before encoding? And if so, did it have the aforementioned errors?

Make sure to try CD-ripping software with error correction.

I can't speak much for Linux (I only know of grip), but under Winblows try Exact Audio Copy (EAC) [exactaudiocopy.de]. It's got great error correction settings and you can rip in essentially a paranoid mode if necessary.

If that doesn't help, try a different encoder. LAME [sulaco.org] comes highly recommended both from professional trials and from personal experience. Use the latest beta -- it's better than the "stable" release.

Lame is king

[Meleschi]

gogo is no longer under development (it was a college CS project I believe) and the latest beta LAME is now faster than gogo...

Don't believe me? Try the latest Lame!