Damn music industry, part 2

[blufive]

Part 1, in which Gav tries to buy a CD, and gets a beermat

Well, Play.com have told me (politely) to Fuck Off And Die. Time to figure out how to copy the sucker, then, in between badmouthing play.com for not labelling the thing, and Virgin records for screwing it up in the first place.

Comments

[zotz]

Well, a really old single-session CDRom drive should have no problems, and neither should taking a digital out from the back of a suitable CD player.

I can't remember whether you considered going to the Trading Standards or not - it clearly isn't actually a Compact Disk if it's intentionally not red-book compliant, after all. It wouldn't take much effort on your part to take up more than their profit margin's worth of their time.

[blufive.livejournal.com]

Well, a really old single-session CDRom drive should have no problems,

Unfortunately, I've had some experience of attempting to get old CD-Rom drives to work in modern computers [shudders] and since the consumer advice back in those days was "get a multi-session drive at all costs", even finding a single-session drive could be tricky.

That said, it's Cactus Data Shield, the primary mechanism of which appears to be Completely Buggered^TM table-of-contents entries, in complete violation of the Red Book standards, so I'm not sure even an old single-session drive could read it.

As you say, there's always recording stuff the old-fashioned way. Unfortunately, the nearest digital out is 10 meters away as the laser beam burns through walls, and I don't think either of our PCs have a digital input anyhow, so it'll probably have to be analogue. Still, I've not fully explored the software route yet, so there may yet be hope.

Re: trading standards
For the moment, I'm just going to keep being an awkward but reasonable annoyed customer. I've a horrible feeling that Trading Standards won't be able to touch a Jersey-based company, anyhow.