“Recent CDs by Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews Band containing new anti-piracy technology are selling well despite a backlash among some fans angry that the discs are incompatible with iPods, experts said on Thursday,” Sue Zeidler reports for Reuters. “Aiming to curb piracy, labels like Sony BMG, which released both records, are rolling out copy-protected albums in the United States, which let users make three exact duplicates of a CD, and store files on a PC in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Media format. But the copy-protection bars users from importing music onto iPods since Apple’s Fairplay software is incompatible with Windows.”
Zeidler reports, “Record executives said they were continuing talks with Apple Computer Inc. to make these CDs compatible with iPods. ‘It’s up to Apple to flip the switch,’ said one record label executive. Apple declined to comment on such talks. ‘We have not announced any plans to license Fairplay technology,’ said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris… Sony BMG, a joint venture between Japan’s Sony Corp. and Germany’s Bertelsmann, said users can get the music onto iPods by transferring files to a PC, burning them to a CD, ripping those and transferring them into iTunes.”
Full article here.
The copy-protection bars users from importing music onto iPods since Apple’s Fairplay software is incompatible with Windows? Doesn’t iTunes come in a Windows version?
This is an attempt to force Apple to license FairPlay or incorporate WMA, more than anything else. For those who say that Apple’s “closed” iTunes Music Store (iTMS) + iPod system is to blame: Apple doesn’t force people to buy their music from the iTunes Music Store to get access to their music. What does Sony BMG offer? Discs that are useless for iPod users. The best option that Sony BMG offers iPod users are lower quality versions of the albums via iTMS. What if you want the CD-quality version of these albums? Will this tactic work to force Apple to license FairPlay to others or license WMA from Microsoft?
[UPDATE: 8:04pm, EDT: Added first sentence to “take” to highlight incorrect statement in quoted article. Also added “or incorporate WMA” as per reader comment(s) below along with various other fixes.]
Related article:
Sony BMG and EMI try to force Apple to ‘open’ iPod with iPod-incompatible CDs – June 20, 2005
Screw Foo & Dave.
Here we go…they will never be able to outsmart those reverse engineers in Scandinavia, though….
Sod them. Not worth the foo-ing effort.
funny, I bought the Dave Matthews Band album off of iTunes and I didn’t even have to get off the couch to do it… works fine on my iPod. They keep doing this they’ll just drive even more people to buy this stuff online.
Who cares? Just rip a MP3 from that stupid Foo”l” CD and import it into iTune, can it be done that way? As for me, I don’t care FOO!!!
or just buy them from iTunes in the first place.
after working all day the last thing I want to do is go to a music store anyway. I haven’t bought an actual CD since iTunes was launched.
All my music was obtained legally but down loaded or ripped from over 20yrs of buying CD’s : )
Just another reason to buy it from iTunes Music Store instead.
My friend had me rip his FF CD in iTunes on my mac since his PC couldn’t. Worked just fine.
Come on MDN, you usually rip into mistakes like “since Apple’s Fairplay software is incompatible with Windows”. Fairplay IS compatible with Windows because iTunes/iTMS/iPod work perfectly well under Windows. Windows Media is not compatible with iTunes/iPod.
It would also be interesting to see if the copy protection works on Macs, or whether iTunes ignores it and rips it anyway. I’ve got CDs that refuse to mount in a CD-ROM player, but happily mount in a combo drive and are rippable. The label says they won’t work in a Mac, but that’ just to discourage people from buying it because they know the copy protection sucks.
It seems more likely that Sony don’t want these on iPods not for protection against piracy, but in order to promote their own media players. It’ll just lose them sales and rather than admit they were wrong, they’ll blame pirates and try ever more elaborate ruses to treat their customers like criminals.
I have not purchased a single physical CD since April 2003 when the iTMS appeared. But I have managed to purchase over 800 tracks in that same period.
IN the time it took to type, I see that Mattshu has answered the question.
I did the same a while back for a friend with a King’s of Leon CD.
I picked up the new Foo album last week, imported it into iTunes, and then to my iPod, everything works fine.
It’s not about licensing Fairplay, it’s MS trying to get Apple to license WMA on an all iPods. They are trying to make it look like, Hey, don’t complain to us, have Apple “flip the switch” and allow WMA format files to play on their iPods.
True that it would be just a software flick, but there is no way the Apple would let MS set foot on an iPod unless iTMS and iPod start to slip significantly.
It is also just as true that the CD companies could stop with the protection scheme that doesn’t work for all the consumers.
Someone already mentioned (Mattshu) but the DRM restrictions only work on Windows machines NOT Macs, so. If you want to totally bypass the 3 copy limit. Get a copy on CD, cut to MP3 on a Mac. Use on your iPod per usual.
Of course, I should mention, both these albums are available thru iTunes Music Store as well.
OK, this may get me flamed, but what the heck is wrong with the idea that Apple would license FairPlay for the SOLE PURPOSE of such CDs? I get why Apple wouldn’t want to permit iTunes competitors like Napster to use FairPlay, or why it would let other mp3 players to be able to use FairPlay. Apple is obviously not concerned with the principle of DRM protection, since they do it themselves. And according to this article, the record industry execs seem to have no problem with including FairPlay.
SO WHAT IS APPLE’S PROBLEM? What am I missing?
RT
I just won’t buy them. ITMS is good enough for me.
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On my last post, one sentence should read:
I get why Apple wouldn’t want to permit iTunes competitors like Napster to use FairPlay, or why it wouldN’T let other mp3 players use FairPlay.
So ok you can make a couple of copies legaly. But then can you re rip one of these copies then make a thousand copies if you like.
I think Apple should allow any type of file to play on the iPod. It is after all a digital music player. If Steve wants to take over the world he’ll have to open up a bit.
MW = maybe
Foo’s copy protection works great. Also allowed me to rip the CD in itunes on a mac just fine. I quit making exact duplicates of the CD after 8 just to see if I could make more than 3.
Disclaimer: The 5 unauthorized duplicates were destroyed. The other 3 were given to friends.
These cd’s are perfectly capable of working on an iPod if you use a Mac. And for everyone saying just get it off of iTunes Music Store, what happens if I don’t like it? Will Apple reimburse me? Because if I own the physical CD, I can always sell it at a used CD store.
At least with a physical CD, I actually own something. I don’t own anything when I purchase music from iTMS. Its basically a permanent rental.
People, you are crazy if you want Apple to license Fairplay for CD’s. Right now, CD’s work. I don’t want DRM of ANY kind on my CD’s. All the copy protection that is used on some CD’s right now only works on Windows. Why in the hell do people want Apple to license FairPlay for CD’s? I sure don’t want any copy protection on the CD’s I purchase.
LOL…it’s only a problem with iTunes on Windows…From the Dave Matthews Site…
Information regarding Downloading Stand Up Songs to iPods
Please follow the instructions below in order to move your content into iTunes and onto an iPod:
***If you have a Mac computer you can copy the songs using your iTunes Player as you would normally do.*** (LOFL)
If you have a PC place the CD into your computer and allow the CD to automatically start. If the CD does not automatically start, open your Windows Explorer, locate the drive letter for your CD drive and double-click on the LaunchCD.exe file located on your CD.
Once the application has been launched and the End User License Agreement has been accepted, you can click the Copy Songs button on the top menu.
Follow the instructions to copy the secure Windows Media Files (WMA) to your PC. Make a note of where you are copying the songs to, you will need to get to these secure Windows Media Files in the next steps.
Once the WMA files are on your PC you can open and listen to the songs with Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher. You may also play them in any compatible player that can play secure Windows Media files, such as MusicMatch, RealPlayer, and Winamp, but it will require that you obtain a license to do so. To obtain this license, from the Welcome Screen of the user interface, click on the link below the album art that says If your music does not play in your preferred player, click here. Follow the instructions to download the alternate license.
Using Windows Media Player only, you can then burn the songs to a CD. Please note that in order to burn the files, you need to upgrade to or already have Windows Media Player 9 or greater.
Once the CD has been burned, place the copied CD back into your computer and open iTunes. iTunes can now rip the songs as you would a normal CD.
Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above. http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html
I won’t buy a CD that won’t work on my iPod. Period.
MW: “ill” want a ill-advised decision on Sony/BMG’s part!
me not spell goodly in last post me made!
on the iLounge forum, many people who tried it were able to rip both albums into iTunes directly from the bought disks on windows or OS X.
Foo Fighters CDs ripped just fine. Hello retards, try it before you panic, it works just fine in iTunes on the PC or Mac and works with the iPod. Man people are just stupid.
1: read this and use it to crack the discs:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/
2: spread the cracked music files far and wide.
That’ll teach them.
I bought the Foo Fighters CD (because they kick major ass, and by the way Dave Grohl uses Apple Macs) and ripped it to my Mac with no problems.
Amen, Jeff,
There’s no **$)%^ way I’m ever purchasing a CD with copy protection on it, unless it’s to open the package and walk back into the store to return it as defective.
Good Lord, you take a technology that’s worked just fine for a quater century and hose it up the a**, make honest people suffer, and don’t really slow down criminals at all. Brilliant!
MW “place”, as in “place foot in mouth, and chew real hard”
This is precisely why people download stuff. If my bought and paid for CD won’t work the way I paid for it to work then I’ll go and download a more user freindly version.
That is a very, very bad decision
Is the Mac blocked from accessing these CDs to playback/rip? There use to be no issues in the past. If these CDs are Windows-only, then it looks like a possible class action lawsuit is inevitable.
bgmccollum – ROFL, Thanks for adding this. It made the whole article. Another GREAT reason to buy a Mac! Oh those poor poor windoze users and the hoops they are made to jump thru.
I have the new dmb cd, and i have it both on my itunes and on my ipod.
i bought the cd from the dmb store and it plays perfectly on both, so i dont know what the fuss is about
There are also a couple of hardware approaches that can work as well. One is as cheap as chips and the other is more costly.
First, let me make the point that not everyone has access to iTunes online…like Australia (Fuck Sony for being so greedy).
Second, I have used iTunes online from another country and as Apple admits the download is “near cd quality”, Myself and others want cd quality.
And now for the fixes:
1. The Walkman alternative. Plug a good quality portable cd to your audio in socket. Use say AudioHijack and the signal will be read as “clean” (non drm music) Then transfer the music to iTunes.
2. The pre-amp alternative. This is a more expensive option where you use a USB pre-amp. Either one made by Griffin or as I use, a Terratec Producer 26 USB which is more high end. Connect a cd to the pre amp and then connect the latter to a USB socket on you Mac and play. You’ll need to capture the audio with either CD Spin Doctor or Analogue Ripper. Once you’ve done this you can then move onto the fun stage.
3. The fun stage is where you transfer the audio to iTunes or even burn a clean cd. Now I’m unsure whether the new cd is non DRM. However once the music is captured you can transfer it to iTunes.
4. Transfer to your iPod.
Then there’s way to rip dvds using Mactheripper and compressing with Roxio Popcorn. Oops wrong post!!!
Even though there is a lot of flaming on this site when something like cd DRM or the like comes along people can find out how to overcome these faux “problems. Good onya guys and the same for MDN for providing a forum to screw the screwers.
And now I have one simple question I’m just a humble Australian ex musician who doesn’t know what LOL stands for …please help this Antipodean in her/his ignorance.
Hey, Notbikersrule,
LOL stands for “Laugh Out Loud.” ROTFLMAF is “Roll On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off”. Etc.
Now a question for you, you analogue CD ripper. I have a friend who’s slowly recording his old vinyl albums onto his Mac. The recording through a USB preamp works great, but neither of us can figure out how to automagically split the tracks up. Is there some little bit of software (or a VST plugin) that “sees” these silent gaps and can split up tracks based on that? Thanks if you know the answer!
Can’t you just rip it on a Mac and then put it on an iPod. So you give the CD to a friend (who has a Mac) he makes a copy, you put it on your iPod and he puts it on his iPod – wait now you have given a friend an illeagal copy.. Yeah this will help piracy.. IDIOTS
John,
use Garage Band if you have it. it is a great tool for cutting up those old Vinyl tracks. its a little overkill for the application but does a good job.
or you could do what i do and just download (yes from the internets illegally) the albums i have in vinyl. i bought the music, if i want to listen to it in this decade with this decades technology then i dont see anything wrong with “stealing” it. it doesnt weigh on my conscious, and it sounds better than the analogue rips, which tend to sound … bad no matter how careful you are.
Dear John,
My friend Notbikersrule told of your mate’s dilemma. Analogue Ripper gives you the option of doing this. It creates small gaps between songs (less than what’s on vinyl). It also rips albums as songs. The album’s contents are listed as songs. It’s a great little shareware program that just works. The website is: http://homepages.which.net/~i.mann/TAR/Ripper.html. The cost is $US19.95, which is sooo little for so much. I’m using it on an iMac G5 using latest version of Panther.
What pre amp is your mate using?
And I like your reference to “slowly recording”, real time recording is so 1980s.
My wife and me are ex music industry (she was a DJ) and we’ve got a 1200 album collection. I’ve got the unenviable task of transferring the lot of them.
Thanks for the explanation of LOL and ROTFLMAF. The latter I haven’t struck yet. That could be because of the tyranny of distance which is the reality of living in Australia. We do have great beaches though, which in Sydney we enjoy from October until the end of April.
Anyway I hope this software info helps your mate.
Dear unclebob,
I can see your point but it just grates to see people having anything do with illegal downloads. Personally I just can’t do it. Rearding Garagebansd you’re right it is overkill. The Analogue Ripper (TAR) is specifically written for transferring/converting audio from analogue to digital and it only costs $US19.95.
By the way I don’t have anything to do with TAR but I do have a special affection for Mac shareware that is free from bloatware, is stable and just works. But then again we have come to expect this from all things Mac. I do feel sorry for those ignorant Windows’ users. Well just a little bit anyway.
Come on people, read what’s been written. These CD’s can be ripped on a Mac, placed in iTunes, and then transferred to an iPod. There is no problem for us. Since I could care less about the PC crowd, maybe this will be an excuse for them to start looking at Macs.
Even if I can rip it, I’m not going to give any money to a company that tries to block my legitimate rights to copy music to my computer. I don’t steal music. I don’t give away copies of my music. So this is just bogus. Besides, these idiots who run the media companies, do they realize that any copy protection scheme is usually broken in about 5 minutes? So the people who don’t steal music are getting screwed, and the people who do, figure out how to do it in those 5 minutes.
The record companies seem to forget an important point. I love my ipod and ITMS. I could care fucking less about their CD’s and copy protection. If a consumer loves their product, do they actually think they will give it up to get something else to work. If it doesn’t work, that’s their problem. Why should I bother spending my time dealing with them. I just perceive it as their inability to make a product that works.
Step 1) buy the cd
Step 2) download the mp3
Problem solved! (please note, Step 1 may not be required)
funny never had a problem, they both work as normal cd’s in my mac lol
I think Apple should allow any type of file to play on the iPod. It is after all a digital music player.
An iPod can handle any format, just not MS DRM, which is not a format. Someone should Dave Matthews that it’s his fault, not Apple’s. His CDs don’t conform to the Red Book standard, thus aren’t even real audio CDs that can bear the Compact Disk logo.
Just want to add that the Foos CD works fine for me. Ripped it and put it on my iPod. No problem. I guess the copy protection problem is only on PCs…get a Mac, things just work
haven’t bought them.. don’t like the bands.. but again..
theses discs only have problems on Windows..
On a Mac, you can copy them into iTunes and put them on your iPod, as has already been stated above…
It’s very shortsighted of the record companes to do this. There will ALWAYS be ways around DRM. You could easiy get a digital signal out of a CD player, run it thru a professional sample rate converter which would remove the DRM, then record back into your comptuer..and end up with a digital copy of the orginal without the DRM. Yes, it’d take a bit of work…. but it CAN be done!
One more thing to help Apple sell Macs
Well, the point that all of you are missing is that the music industry is always looking out for us, the consumer. Thus, we should never question them because they care so deeply for us.
What’s a CD? Isn’t that some backward technology from the early eighties? Imagine, you had to order by mail or go to a store, where you had to browse through endless stacks of boxes, only to find out that the store did not carry the music you were looking for. And when you liked a new song, you had to buy another 10-15 along with it, whether you liked them or not. And now they are restricting the use of this old technology? Who gives a f§ck?
I have twice (both accidentally) come across these bastard-children copy-protected non-CD’s that wouldn’t mount in my Macs. (They were Dido’s “Life for Rent” and Tina Turner’s Greatest Hits 2-disc set.) In fact, out of five optical drives in my home, they would correctly play in only two.
I found that ridiculous and anti-capitalist, considering that I ACTUALLY BOUGHT THEM and therefore owned legitimate licenses.
So I found a CD drive that would play them, recorded the audio using my PowerBook, ripped them down so I could use them… and summarily distributed copies to everyone I knew, as my own form of private protest.
I don’t make a habit of stealing music, but if an idiot record label is going to sell me non-CD’s (on inspection, they DID NOT carry the “Compact Disc Digital Audio” logo, because they couldn’t, legally, since they don’t conform) that I can only play in 20% of my hardware, then screw THEM.
As a consumer, I should be at least allowed to know about (and avoid) these stupid DRM schemes– because let’s face it, we don’t know these things when we’re browsing the music shops, until we’ve already laid down the cash.
Screw the bastards.
Incidentally, MDN Magic Word is “attack,” as in “How dare they attack my right to own and play my legitimately purchased music?!?”
… oops… in the interest of accuracy, 2/5 = 40%, not 20%…
… but my point still stands.
Magic Word is “use,” as in “I should have used a calculator, if I couldn’t do simple math properly!”
: )
FUK’EM
I bought the Dave Matthews Band CD entitled “Stand UP” about a month ago, ripped it on my Mac into “Apple Lossless” format. Then placed it on my iPod. I encountered NO problems. No copyright warnings. This must be a “PC” thing. Buy a Mac. Play your music anywhere.
Who gives a crap. Neither Dave Matthews or Foo Fighters can play worth a shit anyway, so who would bother with their new copy-protected stuff.
On the other hand, as with any copy protected track or CD, you can always rip the CD to aiff or mp3 and then load it or copy it as many times as you wish. This new Fairplay technology is moronic, ineffective, and only makes me want to spread the word on the workaround.
Message to the greedy record companies… as long as I can hear the music, I can do anything I want with it; buy it, steal it, play it, rip it, copy it, and load it to my ipod. You are not in control of my ears or my ipod.
caio,
jimmy