DJ BoBo Bulgaria ť Articles ť Substandard CD's (Q1)

       Note! Information in this article is just for learning purposes only! I'm not responsible for any using of this information for illegal copying or some other activities against copyright laws! Use this information at your own risk!

       I recently ordered three CDs from Germany - the new DJ BoBo's album "Celebration", its limited edition double CD "Celebratoin" and the single "Celebration". Since the single track is also included on the album, there was essentially no reason to get the single except for the coupling tracks, which were even more paltry than usual for singles - no remixes and a bad quality MOV video. Anyway this is not the subject of this article.

       While I was waiting for the CDs to arrive, I heard that the albums were copy-protected. At first, I didn't think much of this. I wasn't going to copy the album, after all. But my attitude was to change drastically.

       When the CDs was delivered (thanks Sven! You're the best!), the first thing that leapt out were the prominent warning and disclaimer labels:

Diese CD ist kopiergeschützt. Sie ist zum Abspielen auf gewöhnlichen
Heim-Audio-CD-Spielern bestimmt und lässt sich möglicherweise
auf anderen Gerätetypen nicht abspielen. Im Falle von Problemen
wenden Sie sich bitte an djbobo@bertelsmann.de.

which in English means the following:

This CD is copy-protected. It is intended for playing on usual home
audio CD players and possibly cannot be played on other types of devices.
In the case of problems please turn to djbobo@bertelsmann.de.

       Reading the various disclaimers was a sobering experience. According to them, the audio tracks would play in "most" CD players, but not computer CD-ROM drives, CD/MP3 players, or "some" players that supported CDR media. An included player application would allow Windows users to play back a compressed version of the audio, but BMG gave no guarantees that the player would work. Of course users of Macintoshes, or even Linux, were completely out of luck. And liability for hardware or software damage for the mere act of inserting the CD into a CD-ROM drive was explicitly disclaimed. Why did I, a paying customer, deserve a mangled disc that would possibly blow up any drive that it was placed in?

       Anyway, curious about how the copy protection worked, I inserted it into my TEAC CD-ROM drive. After an unusually long mounting period, during which the drive made several unwholesome-sounding noises, the CD was finally recognized. The CD had a data track with the player application, which was set to autorun. Here's a shot of the player with all its various windows open:

       In return for paying money to purchase the albums, I received the privilege of listening to a 63 kbps WMA version of the songs, the only one of which was already available in unprotected and uncompressed form on the single. The WMA tracks sounded terrible. I might have been imagining the poor audio quality (though I doubt it), or I might not have been. But that's beside the point. What was wrong was the very fact that I had to wonder whether I was hearing a full-quality version of the music or not. To add insult to injury, the writer and publisher information on these official WMAs hadn't even been entered. This was seriously shabby treatment.

       BMG had apparently bloated up a 44-minute CD album to fill 800 MB on the CD. All that wasted space, and they couldn't even bump up the data rate on the WMAs to a reasonable quality.

       The bloat comes from the yucca.cds file, which presumably contains the compressed audio data. This file actually has a falsified directory entry - it's not actually that large. In reality, it is only large enough to bloat the CD out to 74 minutes - which would still have left plenty of space for better WMAs.

       Playing the audio tracks off the CD failed - only track 1 played, and that stopped after 10 seconds. CD ripping programs failed more extravagantly. In particular, whenever I tried ripping using my old CD-ROM drive, the system hung, forcing a reboot. Some programs refused to even try to read the disc.

       At this point I was fairly upset with the copy protection. Of course, I resolved to find out how it could be broken. The reason i gave so much effort was that i only have the computer CD-ROM to play the audio CD's. I don't even have an audio system.

       It turned out that the copy protection scheme was called Cactus Data Shield 200 (hence the filename "Yucca"). CDS200 relied on putting corrupt TOC data in the second (data) session to confuse CD-ROM drives. Some programs, notably Exact Audio Copy, had special routines to deal with these corrupted TOCs, but they only worked on certain systems.

       Here we see that all the tracks show up as data tracks. The first eighteen are way too short, and the nineteen contains the rest of what would be the audio data.

       The EAC has the great function to detect the TOC manually, without reading it from the CD itself. After 1-2 minutes of exploring every track of the CD, Exact Audio Copy was now able to reconstruct the correct version.

       Apparently, CDS200 CDs have substandard pressing quality (perhaps as an additional layer of "copy protection"?) The pristine, unscratched, brand-new album registered a quality of 97%, compared to 100% for the simultaneously purchased and un-copy-protected album. After several years' worth of play, dust, and scratches, the album could easily be rendered unreadable. I will make sure to burn an unprotected copy that is actually usable in all CD players and use it for playing on my system.

       Philips has refused to allow its familiar Compact Disc logo to be used on these substandard discs, and with good reason.

       All audio CDs have this logo on them. Note its conspicuous absence on the album's packaging and the CD itself too.

       In conclusion, I will never knowingly buy a copy-protected CD again, nevertheless i love DJ BoBo and his music, and I recommend that you avoid them too.