Virgin and EMI discs -copy protection

How many of you have bought discs from EMI or Virgin only to discover that they don't work in certain CD players? This often affects car CD players and portables. In addition, they don't work well in computers.

These discs are 'copy protected', and are not, actually, compact discs.

I'm amazed that the bean-counters at EMI and Virgin think that we classical music buyers are sharing MP3 files of this music. I'm very tempted to launch a petition and boycott of these labels.

If you have any experiences to share, send them to me directly. I'll be publishing something very soon on MusicWeb (www.musicweb.net), of which I am the early music editor, regarding this issue.

Thanks,

Kirk
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Kirk McElhearn schrieb:

i bought one on Ebay, Handel Violin Sonatas with Christie (and a Japanese guy), it doesn't work on my computer, but without problem on the normal (old and cheap) Sony player I use.

For any who are interested and can read German, there is a fascinating discussion of this issue in the ng de.rec.musik.klassik, a thread titled 'Kopierschutz jetzt auch bei Klassik-CDs'.

Perhaps someone might be able to locate a URL for this in Google?...

Thanks a lot for that link. (I used the longer one to find the start of the thread.)

I'll be studying this thread as it comes in. As it happens, there are a few people who correspond both there and here. Perhaps they might chime

Just for the record, my PC's CD drive had no trouble with the Rattle Beethoven Sympnies set (released 2003).

Regards, Eric Grunin

Will the next step be to make CDs region-specific, so we can't order from MDT any more?

Because it's not copy protected. Curiously, EMI decided that for suche a heavily-marketed release that it would be better not to use copy protection - so many 'average joes' would be buying it that it was better for them to not have the embaressment of CDs that don't play.

But, if you look at the discs, they don't have the compact disc logo either... strange.