How do you play your copycontroled cd

Hello to all,

I would like to know if one of you is able to play the copycontroled cd's in a decent way.
Recently, yes a little late, I found why some of my cd's sound so horible.
It is not the player nor my speakers, but the coding of the cd's.
In the first place I thought its just a very bad recording, what a mistake.....
( Like some older aad cd's, or when your vinyl disc needle got some dust... )

Several technics are used, and asking the producers of those cd's did not give an answer I can live with.

Because I now know the reason why they sound bad, they sound even more horible today.
I could just ditch them, but there is maybe a little chance someone found a way to play them clean ?

Please let me now.

 

It seems to depend on your CD player whether these things play OK or not. I no longer use a CD player - I rip lossless copies in FLAC format using a laptop.
Unfortunately the CD drive in my (HP) laptop won't read these copycontrol CDs so I have to borrow my wife's (Gateway) laptop for them. Once I've made a copy the CDs are stored in a box and never used again, so it isn't a problem.

 

Thanks Inicolson,

When you imported the audio, did all the errors disapear from the contend?
If I rip those cd's then the errors in the original cd remain audilbe, even more with a set of headphones. Filtering of which kind only damages the music even more.

If not, can you give the details of that cd-player in the laptop? I mean mark and type?
Maybe I can try and find such player for my computer too.

 

Well I was expecting yhis was some hot item, but it is not I think.

Well, I am sure there is no player able to play the copycontroled cd' s in a clean way, nomatter which copycontrol is used.
Let go the discs not market as copy controled but do have one of them.

I could not give up to find a way to make them at least playable and not hurting the ear.

At last I found a solution which comes close to what I want.


I Rip the tracks as wav-files,
Then with Audacity I filter them in batch-mode with the notch plugin in the effects tab.
Set to 3300 Hz and a depth of 2,5 Gives a nice sound.
Then I can convert them to MP3 best VBR. which suits my goal.

I hope I made clear what I did... And, It would be very nice to hear what others think about it when you tried it.

I know it never will be the crisp condition you would expect from a cd. But throwing them away was just a bridge too far.


p.s. : I thought I had about 10 noise corrupted cd' s but in the end it came out there are over 30.. A lot of them sounded bad on the stereo but I thought it was because of the bad recording or the age of the original recording... But almost all of them are coded disc's and do not comply to the compact disc standard. A lot of them with the famous root-kit, and market as compact cd. How did they dare.

 

Not sure I have found the bad ones in that all CDs do sound inherently bad compared to Vinyl .. however, I digress. I noted that In Abstentia (Porcupine Tree) would not rip to MP3 for the car but i do have an HB burnit pro which is "unlocked" and so you can copy protected CDs on it .. so I copied the CD on there and then ripped it to SD card in MP3 for the car. It would seem that for the copy protection to work the CD player has to be chipped to read the software that is preventing the copy .. with an HB Burnit pro that doesn't happen .. happy days ...

 

After some experimenting, I came to the conclusion there is no standard way to play or cleanup those discs.
For some clarity, these discs I am talking about. And they are still out there, even new ones !
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Control

The multi session discs are no longer compact-disc, but the cactus/cds200 do carry the compact-disc symbol !

 

I haven't come across these for ages. I seem to remember there were two types of encoding. One had an ISO file at the beginning or end of the disc, so it was possible to burn a disc by selecting all the track's except that one and burning a copy which was then fine. With the other type, the protection files were written alongside the music, so couldn't be extracted. Having said that, I never came across one that didn't play on a standard CD player - it was to stop acopy being made , so they couldn't be ripped to iTunes and such like, hence they often wouldn't play in computer cd drives and for some reason, quite a few in car players? Hope this has been of some help!

 

Thanks, that make it clear why there is such a bunch of needles along the music.
When you record the music, no matter what way, analog or digital, there are always spikes in the music.
Same for listening to the music, there is always a sharp and loud edge around the music.
Not always in every part, but mostly.
When then viewed in, audacity i.e. , you can see the problem.

So I may guess there is no way to filter the spikes out ?
( I think, the error/correction codes are at defined places ? How else would you use them...
And if you can use them, you can filter them, which in fact is using them... )

That might be sad, because, seriously, even when played on an audioplayer, it sounds BAD.
Whould that be also the reason why cd's are almost zero sold those days? I think so.
Then I am a little happy, they broke there own business.

What CD's do the radio stations use. There music, except for some pirat stastions, the "broken" music sounds good there.