Anyone hear of these? I don't know if it's in any way connected to RIAA or anything, but apparently it disallows you from burning an audio CD with this label. It's also interesting that on a copy protected audio cd there is no trademark industry standard "Digital Audio Compact Disc" logo anywhere. Meaning it's not a true audio cd as complies with the standard. I don't think many albums have been released on it but my favourite artist Mike Oldfield's album Tubular Bells 2003, unfortunately, was. Fortunately again, however, the Canadian release (where I reside) is a normal audio CD and not the copy protected version. Anywhere else where the album is sold seems to have this horrible release.

Apparently a copy protected audio cd (identifiable by it's "black sideways triangle inside a white circle" logo) does not play on all audio cd players and in some cases have even caused irreparable damage to the player. And even on the players they work on you can hear audible clicks and pops that are foreign to the original recording. When you pop it in a computer it will not detect any audio tracks and will instead launch a custom audio player which plays the tracks at a fraction of the quality of a true cd audio track (this is done obviously to keep people from recording and making high quality MP3s). Having a custom player also rules out support for a Mac, Linux, and other non-Windows OS's.

It's a horrible attempt to control piracy seeing as literally hours after Tubular Bells 2003 was released the tracks started popping up on P2P programs everywhere. They're also more of a hassle to get working on a player and even when/if you do you hear audible noises not part of the recording and it even causes damage! So the entire point of the whole idea was counter-productive; the piracy never stopped, and the majority of people who honestly went and bought these albums at their local store ended up being the ones who suffered seeing as they can't even enjoy their new product!

Here's a website with more information on it.

Heh, I like this quote from the page:

"'Copy protection' does not stop copyists. They will always find a way around it - the only way to stop somebody copying the music on a CD is to make it completely unplayable (unfortunately, this seems to be the direction the record company is going in)."

EDIT: Doing some research I found out that apparently putting these "audio discs" into an Apple computer can be a very bad idea. One person put a CPCD in their Apple CD-Rom and the computer froze entirely. And it wouldn't eject. Even after a reboot. Plus after the reboot they got simply a grey screen.

Honestly.....why would they even come up with this? It's obviously not going to stop pirates. It just makes life worse for the average music consumer! The companies even admit that it's still possible to make analog recordings into MP3s for personal MP3-player use and that they're not against copying for personal use (one record company said, anyway). So why do they make an "audio CD" that's near impossible to play on its own??