Cactus Data Shield CD copy protection

[michaelab]

Today I bought my first CD with the CDS copy protection system on it, as much because I wanted to play with the copy protection as because I wanted the CD! (the CD is "O Irmão do Meio" by Sérgio Godinho - a well known Portuguese singer/songwriter).

As an aside, whilst browsing in a music shop back here in Portugal I noticed that many, many more CDs are copy protected here than in the UK - I saw many protected CDs which are not protected in the UK. Probably because copying is a much bigger problem here than in the UK...

Anyway, back to the copy protection. Well, first question: does it work? Well, no I made a pretty much perfect copy of it using Nero 5.5 at my first attempt - didn't even need to twiddle with any settings. I say "pretty much" because the only issue is a slight (very slight) glitch in the first track - that's it. That certainly won't put people off.

Now to the details of the system. On the CD cover it says "Designed to play in CD players, DVD players and PCs - MS Windows 95, Pentium 2, 233Mhz, 64Mb RAM or superior, Mac OS 8.6 to 9 with the CarbonLib extension and Mac OS X". Well, it actually doesn't play in my PC's DVD drive, at least not the way I would like it to. It gets about 15 seconds into the first track and then the player software (I tried several) just hangs and the disc is left spinning in the drive - eject is the only way out. Incidentally, the point at which it hangs is the same point that the "glitch" occurs in the copy I made. The copy, incidentally, does play on my PC as a normal CD would

Now, what they mean by PC compatible is that there's also a data track on the CD with audio player software that is set to auto-install (unless you stop it) :inferno: - and then play a heavily compressed version of the CD stored in a file called yucca.cds. They've messed with the CD directory aswell because the file appears to be 800Mb big which is clearly impossible. The entire data track is only 90Mb, containing the player software and the compressed audio file.

I didn't attempt to see what happens if I let the "player" software install, presumably it would work but why am I paying for a 44.1kHz 16bit red-book CD when if I want to play it in my PC I have to listen to some barstardized compressed version? :grrr:

I was btw, also able to rip the CD to MP3 no problem using CDEx so the copy protection hasn't done anything to prevent what it intended to prevent and just caused a lot of potential headaches for people who want to listen to it on their PCs. It isn't going to stop the guy who copies the odd CD for his mates and it's certainly not going to stop the industrial pirates - so what's the f*cking point!!! :inferno:

The CD does play on my CD transport (Marantz CD50SE) so at least that part of it works

Michael.

 

[GrahamN]

What happens if you rip individual tracks to wav files and then burn a compilation from those individual tracks. Does the "glitch" go away? I assume you can get rid of that installation track that way too.

 

[michaelab]

Don't know - I've to to play around with it some more

Michael.

 

[robert_cyrus]

i have the infamous cactus data shield version of natalie imbruglia's last album. couldn't rip it.
gave placebo's latest to a colleague, which has some kind of copy protection on it, same as radiohead and a few others that have come from cd-wow hong kong recently. my pc won't touch it. colleague can rip them perfectly using clone cd.
borrowed blur's latest, which also has copy protection details on the sleeve, my pc wasn't bothered in the slightest.
guess it depends on the copy protection used ?

 

[domfjbrown]

Blur's "Think tank" book edition won't copy on work's Dell PC (but then again neither will anything else right now since the POS has BSD'd on me for no reason....)

I did however get Radiohead's latest to copy no problem at all - for some reason the Blur one would extract up to the last track and then hang EZCD5 (the only software for writing on work's PC).

My home PC is too old, slow and shoddy to make it worth my while trying to copy Blur using something like CloneCD... Not installed Nero because it won't allow me to keep using Direct CD...

 

[michaelab]

Right - had another play. Using CDEx I ripped it to WAV files no problems allthough the glitch in the first track remains (CDEx reported it as a single "jitter" error).

I then wrote the .WAV files back to a CD which is a perfect (apart from the 1st track glitch) copy without any of the player bullshit on it.

BTW, this morning I let the "player" software autoinstall (they're kind enough to provide an uninstall) and let it play the CD. It's even worse than I thought...the compressed version that makes it "PC compatible" is ripped at an abysmal 48kbps :bub:

Now, I'm sure that by playing with the CDEx options a bit I could get a rip without glitches.

Michael.

 

[PBirkett]

Mike, give Exact Audio Copy a try. I swear by this for my ripping...

 

[michaelab]

Thanks Paul - will take a look at it. Either way, it seems that CDS hasn't done anything to stop even the casual copier.

Michael.

 

[michaelab]

Got another CDS protected CD the other day. I tried using CDEx and it worked allthough the 3 of the ripped tracks had errors in them (a half second dropout in the first 10-20 seconds).

So, I decided to give Exact Audio Copy a try. WOW! That is some pretty impressive software. The ripping process took quite a bit longer than with CDEx but it made absolutely perfect rips of the tracks on the CD with no glitches at all.

I'm guessing that what CDS does (amongst other things) is introduce "errors" into the CD rather like those caused by scratches. Normal "audio" CD drives will cope with those errors and correct them whereas PC drives won't? EAC however does the error correction in software and the end result is the same. A perfect rip.

NB: I found EAC to be quite sensitive to the drive used. With my older NEC 5700 DVD-ROM drive it pretty much refused to work. It was ripping at 0.1x speed and would have taken hours to do the rip.

With my NEC 1300A DVD+RW/-RW burner drive though it worked fine and was reasonably fast, even in the slower "perfect" mode.

Michael.

 

[PBirkett]

I am glad you are getting good results. This is a hurdle that I will inevitably have to cross myself, I'll be interested to see how EAC performs with my Liteon LTD-163 and LTR-32123 drives...

 

[Phill77]

Originally posted by michaelab


NB: I found EAC to be quite sensitive to the drive used. With my older NEC 5700 DVD-ROM drive it pretty much refused to work. It was ripping at 0.1x speed and would have taken hours to do the rip.

With my NEC 1300A DVD+RW/-RW burner drive though it worked fine and was reasonably fast, even in the slower "perfect" mode.

Michael.

Its not just EAC that is picky about drives, my old Creative cd writer was also hated by Isobuster.
Never managed to rip any protected cd's with that drive, but my new Liteon DVD/CDR thing works with everything.

 

[michaelab]

Just worked out why EAC works so well with copy-protected CDs - it was the drive I was using :shame:

I was using it with my NEC 1300A DVD-RW/+RW drive as it didn't seem to work at all with my other (DVD-ROM) drive. However since then I've tried CDEx and even iTunes with that drive and they all make perfect copies of copy-protected CDs using that drive

The reason? Well, when I stick an audio CD in the drive it somehow treats it just like a CD player would. All you see is the audio tracks, nothing else - no bogus player app or any data tracks are even visible! What's more, if I use iTunes or any other media player to just "play" the CD it also works fine. Copy protection? What copy protection?

Seems like it has a special "Audio CD" mode. I should think that pretty soon most PC drives will be like that rendering the whole CD copy protection lark a complete and utter waste of time and money

Michael.