copy protected cd's..are they really?

[denis]

i just received a whole heap of albums from amazon today but when i went to put them on my mp3 player i found that some were copy protected. now i'm really pissed off cos the only chance i get to listen to music is on my walkman! since i paid for the albums shouldn't i be allowed to decide on what format i choose to listen to them?
anyway i would greatly appreciate some help and guidance from the more technically minded on the board as there must be some way around my dilemma.
oh and please keep answers as simple as possible as i can barely use a computer! ta.

[29xthefun]

how are you ripping them? if its an old windows media player you may have problems.
When i did i used this a program called CDEX
http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

[Ean]

If your computer has more than one CD/DVD drive, try the other one - my DVD rom used to happily rip stuff that confused the hell out of my CD burner.

What are the albums? And, more importantly, does it say what kind of protection they're using? If not, the record label will do for searching purposes.



As an aside... Yes, you should be able to but in the UK at least: No. Ripping your CDs to MP3 is still technically against the law as it's breach of copyright, however this may change in the near future, and you're extremely unlikely to face any kind of prosecution.

[denis]

EAN!! ya beauty..i tried them in the other drive and it worked..cheers, you're a legend!! who would've thought the solution could be so simple!! 29xthefun, thanks for the quick reply dude, i'll check out that link.

[Damian]

Thankfully it looks like this practice has largely stopped now. The only people that suffered were the people that actually paid money to buy albums - a self-defeating idea if ever there was one. Copied versions were unblemished but the originals actually seemed to do your CD player no good...