Corrupt audio discs, aka "Copy-Protected CDs"

Summary of Sony's new set of non-"Red Book" audio CD releases

There have been a number of UK releases recently from Sony-owned companies (including Epic and Columbia) that have followed the same pattern. The CDs are in a non-"Red Book" format (i.e. they are not fully standard-conforming audio CDs), and they have problems playing on computers and some other devices. The CDs also include brief warning messages printed on the packaging to the effect of "Will not play on Mac / PC". We believe that the corruption format is Key2Audio.

CDs in this category include:

• "A New Day Has Come" by Celine Dion
• "Star Wars Episode 2" soundtrack
• "Spiderman" soundtrack
• "Laundry Service" by Shakira
• "Green Eyed Soul" by Sarah Connor
• "J To Tha L-O: The Remixes!" by Jennifer Lopez
• "This is the Remix" by Destiny's Child
• "MTV Unplugged 2.0" by Lauryn Hill
• "Heart To Yours" by Michelle Williams
• "Flickering Flame" by Roger Waters
• "Celtica" by various artists
• "Masquerade" by Wyclef Jean
• "The Osbourne Family Album" by various artists
• "Live at Budokan" by Ozzy Osbourne
• "Incredible" by Mary Mary
• "Oh yeah! Ultimate Hits" by AeroSmith
• "Dance X-plosion" by various artists
• "Northern Light" by Covenant
• "Justified" by Justin Timberlake

There are likely to be many more in the category coming soon, as it is starting to look like this is Sony's policy for new releases. For that reason, it is worth checking any new Sony release before buying, especially if you are accustomed to using a computer to listen to music, because on-line suppliers especially often do not make it clear that these CDs are only partially compatible with the audio CD standard.

This variant/corrupt CD format has lead to several news reports already:

In general, this variant CD format appears to play on most 'average' CD players, however, more advanced CD players may be affected, for example car CD players or audio CD recorders. Attempting to play the CD on computers gets varied results. On some CD drives, it plays and can be extracted without problem. On others, even simple playback seems impossible. We have heard about several CD drives and computer systems that are so confused by the CD that a complete system reboot is necessary -- so you'd better make sure you've saved everything and have a bent paper clip handy before inserting one of these CDs! (iMac users need to be even more careful -- see below).

For those people determined to listen to these CDs on their computers, we heard of one work-around used to get the Shakira album to play properly by using sticky labels to obscure the outer TOC on the CD. Since then, these kind of techniques have been covered extensively in the media:

It appears that US and Canadian releases of these same CDs are not protected in the same way (for the moment, at least) -- the printed warnings on the cover are absent, and this appears to be a reliable indication that this disk is unprotected for this particular kind of corrupt CD. Also, CDs purchased through CD-WOW have been reported unprotected by many people -- these are apparently sourced in the Far East. One person reported that PLAY.COM also sells unprotected US-release CDs via Jersey. We have also heard that in some parts of Europe (e.g. the Netherlands, Finland and Ireland) some of the CDs are sold unprotected but not others.

We have received many reports about these CDs since they were released, and what follows is a cross-section of the most interesting reports so far.

Failures:

Successes:

That's all the information that we have at the moment. If you have any new information that you think may be of interest, please E-mail us at this address.