I’ve had a CD burner for a few months and have used it to burn my digital photos onto discs. For the first time, I tried copying a regular music CD and couldn’t do it. A message appeared that said the files in the CD-Rom drive are read-only. Is that a copy protection feature installed by Sony (or whoever)? Is there some way to copy a regular commercial CD with a regular CD burner?
Don’t worry, it’s for legitimate space-shifting purposes.
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]I’ve had a CD burner for a few months and have used it to burn my digital photos onto discs. For the first time, I tried copying a regular music CD and couldn’t do it. A message appeared that said the files in the CD-Rom drive are read-only. Is that a copy protection feature installed by Sony (or whoever)? Is there some way to copy a regular commercial CD with a regular CD burner?
Don’t worry, it’s for legitimate space-shifting purposes.[/quote]
Although some OSes show the tracks on a standard audio CD as “files”, they don’t really treat them as such. You need a program to “rip” the audio data from the CD.
www.ahead.de sells Nero, which has a free trial (I forget how long it lasts, I think 30 days).
www.goldenhawk.com sells CDRWin, which has an unlimited-length free trial – but unless you buy it, it will only record the audio tracks at 1X burning speed (74 minutes fora full CD). It will, however, read at maximum speed, and you can use another program (like Nero, which came included with my CD-RW drive, and which is vastly superior) to burn at whatever speed you want.
There are others as well, some of which are freeware. Or you might have gotten one of these with your CD drive and just never tried ripping an audio track before. (EasyCD Creator is a commonly bundled app, which in my experience usually fails to work quite miserably – Roxio (and the previous company, whatever it was) must have been giving it away to drive companies free, or maybe even paying them. I wouldn’t bother even trying this one.)
Note that CDRWin’s minimum speed is affected by your burner. Mine won’t burn any slower than 4X, which I find acceptable for those rare times when I am stuck using CDRWin. Also note that CDRWin’s author is widely disliked for various reasons. Personally, I think he’s a jerk because I bought a copy (3.9A), then had to upgrade to 3.9E to get a driver for a slightly newer CD-RW drive (a TDK 48X, which replaced a TDK 32X that died after 14 months). The key wouldn’t work because he time-limits it for one year – you can use the program forever, but not if you have to get a minor version update to get a new driver for a drive that didn’t exist a year earlier. So now I’m stuck burning at 4X despite having paid him his $80.
On my Nero program, if I just click the copy button, it won’t do it. But if I open the disc so I can see all the files and select them all and drag them to the new disc window, it will copy it.
I used Nero Express before and it did copy audio CDs at the click of a button without the need for changing any settings or manual adjustments.
I’ve got some form of Nero on my burner and Richard’s description sounds like what I encountered. It said I couldn’t write the files onto a CD but first had to copy them to some folder. So I tried to copy them to a folder but was told the files couldn’t be copied – that they are read only.
Because I’m so untechnical, I didn’t know whether the problem was due to my technical ineptitude or the copy-proofness of commercial CDs. With all their noise about illegal pirating, it would surprise me if Sony (and the others) didn’t make their CDs basically copy-proof (except to those with superior know-how). But from what youall are saying, apparently that’s not the case. Apparently, if one has a regular, run-of-the-mill CD burner with software such as Nero, one should be able to make copies of standard commercial CDs. That’s good to know. I’ll have to try it again tonight.
CD Audio and CD Rom use different formats. If you burn audio tracks (.WAV files) as a CD Rom disc, it won’t work in a CD player, you’ll have to put it in a computer and open the files manually. You have to burn it as a CD Audio disc. Because it’s a different format, you can’t just copy the audio tracks off an audio CD as files with explorer, your CD burner software should have something that can do it, Media Player can do it too. Choose .WAV files for best quality.
If a CD is copy protected, it will say so. If you look closely, you will also notice that there is no ‘CD Audio’ logo, Philips won’t let them use it because they don’t follow the CD standard.
As for ‘Read Only’, not sure what you’re doing there, but files on CD’s are marked as ‘read only’ (makes sense if you think about it), and when you copy them to a hard disk, they are still marked as read only, you can change that in explorer by right clicking on the file(s) and choosing ‘properties’
Don’t make it too complicated, if he wants to copy from an original CD to a CD-R/RW there is no need for using Media Player, ripping, compressing or moving files and folders, just use NERO Express.
Select “Copy a CD”, throw in the original and insert the CD-R/RW when prompted to do so. Done.
Rascal is right. You can use directly “Copy entire Disc” with Nero, if your computer is fast; read and write speeds are good enough to make direct copying. Is your CD burning software Nero, if so which version ?
Or you can make your CDs image first (ISO,CUE or Nero’s own image) and later you can burn that image to CD. It is more safer if your computer slow or have low memory.
Some Audio-CDs are nowadays copy-protected. These ones you can’t copy with Nero or Easy-CD. You need some more sophisticated ripping tool. All original music CDs with copy-protection has a small sign telling that it’s copy-protected. Normally they try to hide it or make it as small as possible.
I ones sent a mail to Phil Collins telling him that I will never by his CDs any more since I’m not allowed to make a copy to be used in my car.
He did not reply!
MT, give CDRWin a shot. It is a pain to figure out, because the initial user-interface doesn’t have menus, and even once you get past that it isn’t obvious what some things do, but it’s easy enough once you get used to it.
Lessee, assuming you install 3.9E as a “free trial version”, stepbystep:
I’m pretty sure that’s correct – I can’t get CDRWin to start right now because my CD-RW drive is hooked up to another machine.
This should save individual .WAV files for each track. Nero can use these to record an audio CD.
I will read through all your advices and try again tonight.
For now, though, I find it very strange that CDs aren’t ordinarily sold in some copy-protected format. After all, record companies and movie studios pressured US Congress to pass the unconscionable DMCA, that makes it illegal to sell devices intended to circumvent copy protection devices (even when such circumvention might be to enable customers to use products that they purchased for legitimate fair use purposes such as a back-up copy or space-shifting).
Industry went through all the trouble to get the DMCA passed and they chase infringers around the world in order to harass them and file lawsuits against them. So why the hell don’t they routinely make their products uncopyable? Just curious.
MT, as far as I know, they’ve tried. I don’t know the tech but I suspect that the very act of them being playable on the computer makes them copyable. The last thing I heard on this subject was that someone brought out CDs that had a ‘hidden’ track that meant they couldn’t be played on a computer and hence, not easily copyable. There were repercussions: a) people complained they couldn’t play their legit CDs on their computer for personal listening pleasure and b) it was discovered by resourceful hackers that the protection could be circumvented by scribbling physically over the track with a felt tip marker. D’oh! 
Theresa:
They haven’t done it very much yet because the schemes don’t really work very well. You can very easily get software to copy DVDs, which is what the DMCA was really intended to protect - in fact the laws may well have encouraged people to write and give away the tools for free. And there are similar means to break CD protection schemes. Plus those discs won’t work on any computer and or on many high level stereo systems.
And if all else failed you could just put the CD in a good portable player, hook it up to your computer, and record that way. Just about every drum’n’bass vinyl record ever made has been copied in this manner, it’s not really much of a barrier.
But to get to your original question, use Nero, or get CloneCD. They’re both very easy to use.
i have nero that came with the burner, but i use that for general purpose stuff.
for my cds that i want to listen to on computer or mp3 player, i just rip them with a very simple utility called FreeRipMP3. even writes in the name, song title, album (needs net access).
i think i dled it from zdnet or something. but google it, it’s very simple, one button thing.
if u can’t find it, i can always send u the zip file.
What has been said before regarding this is valid and mostly correct, but there is on little issue often overlooked: for the copyprotection to work the CD must work outside of the standards. In other words a copy-protected does NOT comply with the red-book standard for audio-CDs, and thus the consumer could easily through it back at the manufacturer. I know people who bought copy-protected CDs and after they figured they don’t work on their equipment they returned it.
So I assume that some studios are more cautious about pissing people off and loosing even more revenue.
Power to the people! :mrgreen:
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]I’ve had a CD burner for a few months and have used it to burn my digital photos onto discs. For the first time, I tried copying a regular music CD and couldn’t do it. A message appeared that said the files in the CD-Rom drive are read-only. Is that a copy protection feature installed by Sony (or whoever)? Is there some way to copy a regular commercial CD with a regular CD burner?
Don’t worry, it’s for legitimate space-shifting purposes.[/quote]
A. If you want to copy the whole CD, then user another CD copier. There are lots of copying software.
cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd.shtml
B. If you want to rip selected songs, then use a program to convert those songs to mp3 or wma to your computer.
I guess this could go in here -
I have been burning VCDs using Nero 5.whatever-the-latest-patch-is recently, and sometimes they are fine, and other times the picture is upside down.
Any ideas about this? Nero’s great help file doesn’t seem to say anything.
Thanks.
I’ve not had many problems with Easy CD Creator. The few that I did have a problem with, I used CloneCD, and that seems to work. Give those a try.
Slow it down to 12x. I never have trouble at this speed.
Brian
I’d just like to add this nice tool. The name of the tool is CDex. I have used this tool for years now. I rip CD audios using CDex and write them back on another CD as CD audio. Pretty nice tool for copy protected disks. If your CD is copy protected, then try using CDex. It’s a pretty old CD ripping tool but works fine even until now.
And best of all it’s free. Here’s the link
cdex.n3.net/