I should now be writing my review of Radiohead's new release "Hail to the Thief". However, the brilliant marketing minds at EMI Australia they have decided to corrupt the CD in the name of "Copy Control". The corrupted CD does not play in my main hi-fi, which can't see any tracks to play. Well done EMI. I'm certainly not going to purchase EMI products ever again, so there's no chance that I'll be a source for pirating their CDs. And they wonder why CD sales are going down...
The "Copy Control" that this CD uses is called Cactus, which plays around with the error-correcting bits of the CD. Computer CD players need bit-perfect data, so they fully utilise the error-correction, whereas audio CD players are not so fussy. The error corrected sound is made deliberately to sound worse than the uncorrected sound. In practice, this means that playing the CD on a computer will produce poor-quality sound (lots of pops and crackles) and lots of skipping.
To try to satisfy people who want to listen on their computers, a low-fidelity version of the whole album is burnt onto another session on the CD, and a special player application is installed to play this. So, you pay money for the album, but then get to hear a low-quality version of it - it's certainly not CD quality. The player application is also very resource-hungry. Playing a normal CD should involve no CPU usage, so it you're not using an application with a fancy real-time CD analyser then you should see the CPU sitting at 0%. The Cactus application, in contrast, uses 80% of my CPU, which is an AMD K6-200. This effectively means that nothing else can be run on that computer at the same time as the music is being played.
My main hi-fi uses a computer CDROM drive connected to my hi-fi amplifer. With the Cactus CD, the drive sees a data CD, not music, so it just sits there. I am not going to buy a new hi-fi just to play this one CD, so it may just have to go back for a refund.
There is no way that a Cactus CD will last as long as a proper CD, because the error-correcting information cannot be used to compensate for dust and scratches. Also, there's every chance that future hi-fis will have problems with it. I don't think the chances of getting a refund on the CD in two years when you purchase a new hi-fi are good.
Technology - who needs it?