Linux

For Christmas I received two new CDs from a group I've come to really enjoy, Gregorian Masters of Chant. I bought the only album I could find at B&N a few months ago and added several more to my Amazon wish list. The CD I bought before easily imported into iTunes, as did the first of the two new CDs. But the second, Gregorian Masters of Chant Chapter I,I did not. Upon closer inspection of the case I found the following: "This CD cannot be played on a computer disk drive."

What?!?

While I vaguely remember hearing about this in the past, this is the first time I've come across it. What record company would be so idiotic? These days many people don't even own a standard CD player. While I still have my stereo, I gave away my Discman shortly after receiving my first iPod. I promptly Googled means of getting around this. Since I'm still stuck with Windows 7 on my laptop,  I first looked for solutions there. Serveral forums said that if you held down the shift key the disk would not auto-load, which prevents the CD player from hanging up on the CD. This proved accurate. The forums also said that once it was in the computer Windows Media Player versions later than 8 would recognize the CD and rip it. For me at least, that was not accurate.I'm currently using version 12, which would not acknowledge that there was a CD in the machine. Any attempt to access it from other programs caused the player to hang.

So I popped the CD into my Linux machine at work. Holding down the shift key did n't prevent autoload on Linux. But I became too busy to pay attention to it for a while. When I got back to it, the CD was loaded, and the CD ripper that came with Fedora 11 happily ripped 12 Oog Vorbis files for me (.oog).

On the one hand I'd ecourage people to check for this and think twice about buying CDs with this protection. But on a more selfish note, I really like this music. While I strongly considered trying to return the CD, Linux has ultimately saved me from trying to go through the trouble of returning an opened CD. Once again, thank heaven for Linux.