Copy protected audio CDs with Easy CDDA Extractor

10 May 2003 9:14 by Lasse "cd-rw.org" Penttinen | 3 comments

The copy protected discs have a data session and an audio session on the CD. Regular CD audio player bypasses the data session and plays the audio portion of the disc. One major issue with copy protections is that some players don’t find the audio session on the disc (for example some MP3 enabled players). Computers read the data sessions and the audio tracks are kind of "behind" the data session.

Easy CDDA user several measures in order to discover the audio session from the protected CD.

In the Action menu you’ll find the "Read Table of Contents"-function:

Auto = reads the disc as usual and recognizes if the TOC is invalid = the disc is protected. The software performs session analysis in order to extract proper TOC information. If this fails the software performs sub-code analysis on the disc for the same purpose.

Normal = Easy CDDA reads the disc normally and doesn’t detect protections

Session Analyze = Reads the session information on the disc and looks for the audio session information

Subcode Analyze = Scans every track on the disc and detects all sessions.

All drives do not support Session Analyze-function and therefore the Subcode Analyze-function was also developed. With these two methods, any CD drive should be able to discover copy protected audio tracks from the disc.

However, some drives may still be unable to read the copy protected discs, even though the session information is found. With Plextor drives there shouldn’t be any problems. With Plextor and Easy CDDA I have been able rip every "Copy Controlled" disc available on the local market.

I believe that Macrovision has some more advanced protection developed, but I haven’t had a chance to experiment it with yet. I am certain that it is possible to bypass some way too, in case that current Easy CDDA version couldn’t handle it (untested).