Hello,

I have this new CD from Muse called Hullabaloo. It's a double CD and only one is protected. The publisher is Universal. Produced in Germany.
But, none of the descriptions fit very good with what has been written about audio protection.
1) If you insert and explore the CD, it contains only a player (called wmmp.exe and not cactus-something.exe) and no tracks (ie no data and no audio tracks)
2) inspected with cloneCD you get 2 sessions,
first session with 10 tracks, the 9 first ones are 1722kB in size, the last one is 399405 kB. (but the music is actually 11 tracks !!)
second session is 1 track with 323420 kB
So the CD is full up to 73min,58sec
3) there's nothing written on the cover about MidBar Tel Aviv or else. There's no markin in ce CD center as for Key2Audio
4) Visual inspection gives one 1mm wide line at approx. the end of the audio. No fine lines between the tracks as reported in MediaCloq
5) ClonyXXL finds only Dummy tracks (but then again I have a problem with the aspi layer and I can only start ClonyXXL without aspi )
6) Trying to make a CD image with clone CD using all of the advices given in the first post of this thread results in:
- most sectors 1 ~ 700 (track 1) are defect
- in each following track some sectors are defect.
- so produced CD image does not work.
- takes an awful lot of time

If trying to make an image including session 2 (above was made with only session 1), CD-ROM gets in an infinite reading state and it's difficult to stop it (ie kill task etc.)

So here are my questions:
- What CD protection is this? (Is universal using different protections in Europe than in USA?)
- May some of the issues be related to my hardware (writer TEAC CD-W512EB firmw: 2.0B, reader TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-M1502 firmw:1008) and not solely to the protection.
- What advices are there to back-up this thing (except recording the audio, that's not what I call a solution )

Thanks for an answer and sorry for the long post.
FlatQuantum