>Ahhh yes, copy controlled.

The new Beatles album – Let It Be… Naked is encoded in such a way as to prevent copying. Scott had attempted to circumvent the protection on a Mac and PC at work — didn’t work. He said it truncated the first two tracks seemingly at random – cutting off the beginning the first time they tried it, and the end the seccond… getting only about 30 secconds of audio at a time.

I remembered the “shift trick” for which the college student was given a cease and desist order (or something) for publishing it when they first copy controlled albums came out. Just hold the shift key down when you insert the CD and NEVER install the software. iTunes was having a hard time reading the first two tracks, 100% CPU for a minute or two with no sound. I clicked onto track 3 and it finally started playing. I clicked import, thinking it would start from the track I was on… but au contrair… it started ripping track 1, 2… and the rest of the CD without incident. Other then the initial CPU weirdness (probably throwing all kinds of algorithms at it) there were no issues.

Josh – 1, CD Protection – 0

Ooooooh, yeah.

That aside… it’s a really good album, crisp, clean, and the songs really are naked compared to the original album versions.