Hi,

I have been browsing cdfreaks.com and I must say there is a ton of information on it but I am having a bit of trouble that I can't seem to get a direct working solution for and it's pissing me off.

I recently purchased a copy of k-os's new album Joyful Rebellion. I never bothered to check out the CD until I got home and popped it on my PC to discover this weird player that spawned and played the disc. I couldn't get any other program to see the audio tracks. Long story short, it's got Macrovision CDS-200 protection on it. (CDS-200.5.11.90 or 5.10.090, both are in the version.txt file)

I've tried Nero, EAC, CloneCD, Audiograbber, EA-CD... nothing can get this stupid disc to convert to a format that I can use for my MiniDisc player.

I was gonna try the felt-tip pen trick but I can't find the track on disc. (it looks like one solid surface with no separate tracks visable)

My PC is running Windows XP Pro and my CD drive is a Yamaha CRW6416SZ INTERNAL SCSI-2.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Look in the "Audio" forum here, there is tons of info on CDS200. The felt pen won't really help as it's hardware errors on the disk that stops the ripping, you really need to have a drive like a Plextor that will rip it using EAC.

Yamaha's usually have a problem with the first track but can rip the others, this depends on which Yamaha you have.

I have been browsing the Audio forum and it seems that trying to read the illegal TOC is relatively easy and that's the work-around for CDS-200 but every single program I do that in I still can't view the proper TOC... it all comes up as 14 Data tracks when their are 13 Audio tracks.

Now I did run the player the first time but I used the uninstall.exe on the CD to remove the player... maybe it screwed up some file on my PC that I need to properly do the read and conversion?

have you tried installing AnyDVD then rebooting and then try ripping?

ben

Yamaha's always read Track 01 as data - but you can rip the others. To get track 01 the felt pen trick is needed.

I did Ben, and the plot thickens... seems my ASPI-drivers are messed up. I recently put on new drivers (Adaptec ASPI Win XP drivers) and I can't get an ripping programs to open up regardless of what Audio CD is in the drive. This stupid CD has really pissed me off, I think it's clearly overstepped it's protection abilities and knocked my PC's ASPI drivers out of business.

Any suggestions at this point?

CDS200 doesn't effect drivers, it's simply an illegle TOC (Table of Contents) + C2 errors. The Yamaha drives are picky though - my 24x died on me so I can't recall what happend, no advice except to buy a Plextor.

If this gives you too many headaces, just use the ine-in for your audio card and record the CD from your player - that always worked for me.