it…out

When we picked up the new DMB CD at Best Buy this weekend, I noticed that on the back of the CD case was a lot of fine print and even a scary-looking government seal saying something to the effect that the CD was protected (by none other than Sunncomm) and that if you wanted to play the music on a computer or have the music available on electronic music devices, you had to use the DRM’d WMA’s supplied on the data portion of the CD. They claimed that these WMA’s work with Windows and Mac. So under this system, not only can you not listen to the music in any format you want, if you don’t run a supported OS, you can’t listen to it at all. (as it turns out that doesn’t really matter because while the supplied WMA’s don’t play on Linux, neither does the DRM software, so the CD rips as normal [see below])

So how does Sunncomm’s protection work? I have no idea, but I understand it involves installing a special device driver on your computer upon the first insertion of the CD via autoplay. This is all done without actually asking you. A very detailed description can be found here. Following that link lead me to realize that how Sunncomm’s DRM works is not nearly as important as how to disable it: hold down the shift key while inserting the CD (which I guess disables autoplay in XP); or disable autoplay completely.

I chose the later approach and imported the CD’s audio tracks into iTunes without issue. I also ripped the disc to ogg format with gnome’s sound-juicer app. It was slow, but it worked.

Now it would have been bad enough if that was all this disc did, but it also caused this guy’s computer to crash and reboot.

So what are we left with? A crippled CD whose DRM is not only ineffective, but also hazardous.

I should have just bought the stupid thing on iTunes.

Actually after listening to it, I think I would have been better off not buying it at all.