Bought some CDs yesterday. Got home and noticed ONE of them had the “Will not play on PC/Mac” notice. Sure enough it wouldn’t play in iTunes and certainly wouldn’t import. Resolved to take it back to the shop. Tried another CD. It also wouldn’t play or import. I felt a bit let down as the latter definitely had the CD logo. Tried the third disk – not only played but imported fine. Fourth one also worked fine.
I’m more than a bit hacked off now. One of them had the CD logo which is meant to imply a standard and no warning that it wouldn’t work. The other was my own fault – but I was too busy paying good money to notice.
The really annoying thing was that I opened my DELL craptop, downloaded WinAMP and played ALL of the CDs fine – admittedly it was a very recent update to WinAMP. I still, on the other hand, couldn’t encode them using any MP3 encoder that I could find. That makes the CDs next-to-useless for me. I never carry CDs around – I MP3 them and listen to them on my laptop.
And I’m allowed to do that – it’s called Fair Use. I don’t supply my MP3s to other people, I don’t copy my CDs and give copies to other people. Under the guidelines for Fair Use I’m permitted to make a copy of the CD for personal use.
If I wanted to I could still output the CD to tape and give copies of the tape to all of my friends. It would be highly illegal but I’m technically able to do that. It’s the big bad scary Internet and techno-savvy music-thieves that the record companies are targetting.
It’s possible to defeat the copy protection using a marker or a post-it or a bit of tape. But that means going to some lengths just to get a CD that I own and music that I have legally licensed to work in my Cd player.
As a matter of principle I’ll be returning the two CDs that do not work in my CD player as they are sold as Compact Discs yet do not conform to the Compact Disc standard. I don’t believe that I should be assumed to be a thief just because I use a computer.
The real irony is that I always buy CDs if I like two songs or more on the CD. I usually hear the music through Internet Radio stations which use MP3 quality tracks. I can see a time when I can’t buy any more CDs because I refuse to have this copy-protection muck in my possession.