I tried ripping the latest Beastie Boys album, "To The 5 Boroughs", yesterday. "To The 5 Boroughs" contains Copy Control technology but because I disabled autorun I figured I had nothing to worry about because their piece of crap software wouldn't install. The fact is, on my home PC, I couldn't read the contents of the CD let alone rip it. Navigating to my CD Rom drive in Windows Explorer displayed a completely empty folder. It was as if I was trying to play a blank disc.
In the past I had no difficulties whatsoever ripping Copy Controlled CDs such as Nickleback's "The Long Road", but I've since swapped CD Rom drives and my current drive couldn't interpret the Beastie Boys' latest release. This, apparently, is one of the negative side effects of such shallow practices. I hate the fact they're trying to prevent ripping in the first place but preventing playing of the CD on some players and CD drives is insane. There was nothing I could do yesterday to get this disc to play in my home CD.
At work, I popped in this very same CD and ripped it without a problem. The MP3s sound great and now I'll copy the files back to my home PC. EMI didn't prevent me from ripping their product and converting their song files to MP3s, but they did piss off a customer. Was it worth it? One glance at the P2P networks currently sharing "To The 5 Boroughs" will tell you it wasn't.
