OK - the most relevant part of copy protected CDs such as Eminem's latest release is that they won't play in your computer CD drive - they'll only read on your discman or dedicated CD audio deck.

Stop me if I'm missing something here, but

What's to stop you running a line out of your CD audio earphone / speaker socket, and running it into the Line In of your sound card...
Then record the entire CD to hard disk as a virtually lossless wav file.
Then burn the wav to CDR directly.
Or convert to mp3 for posting on grokster / kazaa etc.

That whole process shouldn't take much longer than an hour.

Ergo copy protection would only make a difference to someone who doesn't have all of the following:
Discman / stereo
PC with soundcard
600Mb disk space
double-ended audio cable

The latter is easy to obtain or make.
So what's the point of copy protection?

You will lose quality in recording it this way.

This option has been suggested several times in this forum for users who aren't able to back up audio protected CDs.

The thing is, you convert audio to a analogue signal and then through analogue connection you save it in a digital format. You will have two important steps where quality loss occurs.

Perhaps when you use a high fidelity CD-player that supports optical out, then connect the optical out to an optical in of your soundcard. There will still be a slight loss of quality, and you will have to have a pretty good stereo and PC setup, but this is the second best option as far as I can see

I agree
I've made a few test cd's for my pals to listen to, some ripped the "usual" way and others done via line in with a cheap (£30 at the computer fair last week!) SB Live 5.1 soundcard.
Those with "golden ears" may spot the difference but I've had no complaints yet.

I'd refer to Natalie Imbruglia's White Lilies Island album which has CDS 200 protection on some of the releases others were normal red book cd's.

As I say no one spotted the difference.



Protection is just another excuse to bump up the price of the CD, because the consumer has to pay for it. (Protection that is...)
So we pay more or the same for a product that does less!!

Budge

Maybe so but I have a really nice Yamaha cd-player for normal use and that has an Optical Out and on my PC I have a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum EX (the one with the external thingy) and that has an Optical In.


If I would play the disc in my cdplayer and record it using the optical out/in wouldI still have a loss of quality or not??

Lost of quality .......probably, but can you hear the difference?

Why not make some test recordings and let us know what you think using optical in/out method as opposed to line in/out

Most people prefer a digital 1-1 copy. If your hardware doesn't allow you to copy the protected audio cd the tricks mentioned here are a good second choice. (Preferably the trick with digi-out to digi-in before the analog copy of course!) Another trick would be to hide the corrupt sessions (these corrupt sessions are part of the audio protection) like is done with a CDS200 protected cd in this image

I agree completely about the preferred method of Audio extraction but it's nice to build up a picture of options for the hard to do stuff.

By the way this forum is a fabulous knowledge base.
Read you many times Upp3rdOG