Originally Posted by
schmidj
There were a number of different attempts at copy protection used, most commonly in the early 2000's. Do Google searches and you can read about some of the techniques that were tried, and the names of many of the CDs. Almost all of the CDs were re-issued later without copy protection, as people came up with various ways of defeating it and the record companies came up with other ways of dealing with "illegal" downloads (most of which looked to make criminals out of some of their better customers and in my opinion has much to do with the downfall of the music business). So the accuraterip numbers may well be from the un-copy protected versions of the CDs. Also, the manufacturers of some of the computer drives modified their firmware to be able to read the CD despite the copy protection.
I recently have run into a few copy protected discs (the jewel case insert even says so) in a large batch of used CDs I acquired. One of them wouldn't play in most of my drives, but ripped without error in a newer BD recorder drive I owned.
And then I found a copy of the Charley Pride CD which was one of the first "protected" CDs issued (and has been re-released un-protected). I couldn't get any of my various pieces of ripping software to recognize it as an audio CD (even with covering up the data files which was supposed to "un-protect" it. Then I tried ripping it in VLC Media Player. I was able to recover all the audio tracks, but only one track at a time. I'm sure it would have been simpler to look for a used un-protected copy on eBay, but I took it on as a challenge to be able to get it to play on my computer.
Also there is a "defective by design" burst ripping option in the security settings of the dBpoweramp ripper that rips some protected CDs. And finally, I've run into others that ripped with a bunch of rerips (set the maximum number of allowed rerips and any timeout setting high enough to not error out). Just to see what happened, I let a couple of those rip all night. They came back with some tracks "insecure", but I listened to the results. Most tracks had no error audible to me, a couple of tracks had a minor obvious fault (click or momentary dip in the audio) not bad enough to discard the track. I've also ripped some apparently protected CDs in burst mode, again, in most cases the errors were not audible even though they didn't match the database checksum.
The ultimate way to "defeat" copy protection is to play it in an ordinary CD player, not a computer, and record the audio on your computer using audio editing software like Audacity. If you want to get what the record companies intended to be a bit perfect copy, find a CD player with a digital output (like were often used in radio stations) and get a USB audio interface with a digital input. But if you play the CD on an analog CD player of any decent quality (even a pretty cheap consumer one) and use even an inexpensive audio interface (or even the line input jacks built into your computer if it has them) you will be hard put to hear any significant difference in the end result.
That is the stupid thing about the whole copy protection business. They couldn't stop the analog output of an ordinary CD player from functioning (as otherwise your CD would just be a coaster, no-one would be able to play it), and there was nothing to stop anyone from recording the analog output on any type of recorder and ending up with a copy that for all intents and purposes sounded just like the original. When the record company people finally realized that, and when people began to be more interested in downloads (no matter whether the original source of the download was digital or analog) they shifted their efforts to trying to shut down the "napsters" of the world and attempting to sue the people who used them.
I'm not promoting or in favor of stealing the intellectual property of others, certainly the Napsters of the world were on the wrong side of the copyright laws. But if you look at the relations between most musicians and the record companies they contract with, you'll see that the business model used by most record companies is no friend of most musicians. Just ask Taylor Swift about that. So their efforts at suing the downloaders was not about protecting the interests of their artists (or songwriters) but rather at protecting their own bottom line, and you see where the whole music business has gone. You will find almost any piece of music on YouTube, usually put there by the record company which owns the copyright, you can watch it for free, the record company collects part of the advertising income that Google gets for the adjacent ads, and the musicians and writers (who sold their song to a publisher) get next to nothing.