I recently bought a CD that turns out to have some sort of copy protection. That's all just fine (not really GNU, but I understand the music industry wants to be able to keep making money), but I'd like to be able listen to the music I buy! My home HiFi plays it fine, but my car cd won't recognise it and unfortnately I spend more time listening to music in the car than anywhere else.

I've tried both grip and sound juicer, but whereas the first simply didn't respond, the second started spinning my cd at about a zillion rpm and my only way out was to pull the plug on the system. What can I do to be able to listen to the music I bought in the car?

If you're interested (or if it is any help) I bought Radiohead - Amnsiac.

Do you have itunes in Spain?

If you can't read the CD with your computer CD-ROM drive then your only real out is to record it through your HiFi system.

bother !!

don't know itunes

You may have success with the following procedure:

First copy it with cdrdao:

read to a file (adjust device entry as needed for your system):

cdrdao read-cd --source-device /dev/sg0 --device /dev/sg0 --driver generic-mm
c --datafile /tmp/my_cd.dat /tmp/my_cd.toc

write to a cd (again, adjust the device as needed)

cdrdao write --device /dev/sg0 --driver generic-mmc /tmp/my_cd.toc

Then, use grip as normal to rip it. You may have to adjust the start block for
some of the tracks.

after reading that like 5 times, I have decided to google for a cdrdao rpm for fc3 and see what I can make of it. I'll let you know if I got it to work

Sorry it wasn't very clear. You do need to get cdrdao installed. You also need to know which device your CD/CD-R is on. On my system, it happens to be /dev/sg0. This can usually be determined by looking in /etc/fstab, or the output of dmesg.

So, the first thing you need to do is read the CD to a temporary file on the hard drive. To do that, pop the "protected" cd in your drive, and run this command (all on one line):

cdrdao read-cd --source-device /dev/sg0 --device /dev/sg0 --driver generic-mmc --datafile /tmp/my_cd.dat /tmp/my_cd.toc

This will read the disc from device /dev/sg0 and create two files: /tmp/my_cd.dat and /tmp/my_cd.toc.

The next step is to create a new CD from your temp files. Run this command (all on one line):

cdrdao write --device /dev/sg0 --driver generic-mmc /tmp/my_cd.toc

With luck, you will now have a copy of your disc, minus the annoying copy protection. Use grip to rip the newly created disc.

Occasionally, this will result in a disc with tracks that have blank space at the beginning/end. You can either edit the blank space after ripping, or tell grip to adjust the start/end sectors.

Hope this is clearer....

thanks!!

I finally installed cdrdao and followed your instructions. Output looked fine, but after about 8 seconds the drive went crazy again and started spinning like mad, making an awful sound. I tried to interrupt the process, but finally managed to open the drive with the eject button on its front.

Just t make sure it wasn't anything to do with my drive I tried the process with another (unprotected) cd and everything went smoothly. The output from the successful read was identical to that of the protected cd.

Where do I go from here?

Tried burning a cd which I successfully read with dcrdao, but I get a calibration error. cdrdao writes the TOC, but then brakes off, so I lose the cd. I haven't found any options to configure it. Writing went well with k3b. How do I avoid this error with cdrdao?

I'm not sure on that one. That error almost sounds like a problem with the type of cd's you are using, but of course the fact that k3b works (with the same batch of discs I assume) kind of point away from the discs.
Any chance of trying with a different drive? I have found in the past that some drives read much better than others.

This is an AOPEN RW-3248 (no other drive for burning available) which outperforms the reading capacity of my LG DVD...

Maybe I could force K3B to read at 2x and so avoid it going into 'overdrive' with the protected CD.