DMB, Stand Up and copy protection
Before you read any further, know this … I am firmly against copying and sharing intellectual property of any type. Working for a company whose bread and butter is intellectual property, and knowing that I’m going to put my kids through school based upon intellectual property, I do not and will not condone copying of software, music, movies, etc., for the purposes of sharing with others who haven’t paid for it.
Now, here’s something I don’t get … a friend approached me today (she manages a local Starbucks) and said that the Dave Matthews Band CD, Stand Up, is copy protected and doesn’t rip properly. She’s using Windows Media Player, iTunes and an iPod. I found this odd and, always up for the challenge, bought a copy of the disk and told her I’d try it myself. What I found is that there is an attempt to protect the music on this disk which is totally ineffective. Here’s what I did, which I don’t consider to be too far out of the norm …
My software configuration consists of Windows Media Player, MediaFour XPlay and an iPod (I’ve never installed iTunes and I likely never will.) I threw the CD in my laptop’s drive, opened Windows Media Player 10 and chose to rip the CD using 256k MP3.
It worked like a champ. I played it back using Windows Media Player and it sounded fine. I dropped it on my iPod with XPlay and it sounded fine. I called her back and reported the “good news for me, bad news for you.”
I decided to dig a little deeper and found a couple of things:
- The CD apparently has Windows-based software on it that makes it possible to rip to protected WMA; since I have AutoPlay turned off (I run under a limited user account and do not like software magically trying to install things on my machine without my permission), I never saw anything about having to install the CDs software and if I were on a Mac, I wouldn’t have seen anything either
- I found this link on davematthewsband.com which tells you how to get around the copy protection, should you have installed it via step 1 above
What I don’t get is why would you publish a commercially DRM’d CD and then publish the method for getting around it? (I realize that it’s possible the workaround was published after the CD was released and there was some backlash about it.) Furthermore, the workaround published means you end up ripping a copy of a copy, and since the first copy is compressed in a lossy format, your second copy is a little off. But some quick MSN Searching showed another method for pulling the audio to WAV (an exact copy) and then converting the WAV to WMA, MP3 or whatever, resulting in a first generation copy.
Oh … and I’ve never listened to DMB before, but this CD has quickly grown on me! Glad I bought it :-)