Are We There Yet?

A few months back, I bought a new CD for probably the first time in over 12 months. I'm not a big fan of the RIAA and their recent manipulation of the judicial system to serve their archaic and out-dated desires to stay in the 20th century with regards to distribution of digital media. I'd buy a ton more CDs on two conditions:

1. Prices are lowered to < $10 USD for single CDs. Ideally, I'd shoot for $8.
2. Copy protection is done away with so I can do whatever I would like to with the music on the CD including, but not limited to:
   • making backups on CDRs in case my original gets scratched or becomes unplayable
   • ripping in to the format of my choice so I can listen to it on my computer without using my CD-ROM
   • transferring to my as-yet and for some time in the future unpurchased portable MP3 player
   • copying to a CDR with other legitimately acquired songs in to a mix CD for my own personal enjoyment

I think these are resonable requests provided that I did not do any of this with intent to freely distribute it to my friends, family, strangers or otherwise attempt to make a profit out of it. Something the RIAA has neglected to address in their crusade is what the buyer actually purchases when they get a CD. I am not paying for the physical CD/medium; I am paying for what is ON the medium (e.g. a license for the music). Sites like BuyMusic.com would be the geek's answer to his musical prayers if their licensing format wasn't so strict. Why is it so strict? Because they can't negotiate better licenses from the labels.

Unfortunately, the recent trend of CD copy protection to prevent file swappers from getting copies from legitimately purchased CDs is infringing on the rights granted to me by that license. Case in point (and the whole reason I started this post in the first place): the CD I purchased was Disturbed's latest, Believe. Even though I hate the RIAA and what they're doing, contrary to the picture they are trying to convey about "kids" of my generation, I believe in supporting music artists that suit my tastes and put out a product worthy of my hard-earned cash. This CD is one of them.

Jesus, Doug, get to the point will ya?

So, I buy this CD and get home. Later that evening, I'm doing some homework for an online course I was taking and wanted to listen to the CD. I put it in my CD drive and discover that this CD is "enhanced", which is a clever marketing term that means "we're going to highjack your computer now and display all sorts of cool stuff about this CD and try and sell you merchandise before we let you listen to the music". After closing this out (and turning off auto-run in Windows), I fire up WinAmp to start enjoying some musical madness.

There's just one problem. WinAmp doesn't recognize the CD. In fact, it can't even play a single second of the CD. Nada on Windows Media Player either. Naturally, I was quite annoyed. Because of this problem, I was not able to rip the CD in to MP3 format using either program. The only way I could play the CD on my computer was using IsoBuster which was able to play the raw data from the CD one song at a time, with me manually selecting the next track. When I tried ripping the audio data off the CD using IsoBuster, it came out with lots of static and noise.

So now I'm left with a fantastic CD that I can only play in my car CD player (where I spend an hour a day) and not at my computer (where I spend >10 hours a day). This begs the question of whether or not it was worth it to purchase the CD when the manufacturer/label/artist/RIAA is telling me how I can use it?

The answer? No.