Claude

The website now says 30 january 2006 http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AP2Z6C/

I like this Spanish Blue Note version of the board

Rostasi, neither method is perfect. The audio data on the DVD has a bitrate of 48, while the CD must have a bitrate of 44.1. Unlike CD copying, there is a (small) quality loss due to conversion. Maybe that is what the website means by "almost as good as the original DVD sound quality". With the Nero method, the audio data is extracted from the DVD and converted to the CD format. It is possible to extract data error free, if the speed is not excessive. With the real time method the music is played back and recorded in CD format. If this happens in the digital domain, the sound quality loss should be small, but if the sound from an standalone DVD player is recorded with the sound card there will be digital/analog and analog/digital conversion, the sound quality depending on the converters in the player and sound card.

A limited edition (5000) collector's edition DVD + CD set has just been released in France: http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000BNEMNM/ http://www.ecranlarge.com/jaquette-1461.php The CD contains the music soundtrack. Bonuses on the DVD are a 15 min interview of Louis Malle and a 15 minute interview of René Urtreger on the music. The DVD is in french only!

I think Nero may be necessary because of the AC3 plugin.

Hi rostasi, That was true in the good old analog days, but bits and bytes don't care how fast they are being copied. However when ripping a disc and burning a CD-R, one has to make sure the drives support error-free duplication at the speed that the software offers. In my experience, reducing audio CD read out to 12x speed and burning to 4-8x speed gives the most reliable results. BTW, most current CD-R drives and discs don't support 1x speed burning anymore.

There are also ways to rip the audio data directly from the DVD, without recording it in real time. DVD Video to Audio CD Guide

Thanks Brownie for posting the download link to the Miles & Trane Paris 1960 video - amazing stuff, not to be missed

The boss of SonyBMG Europe has stated in this interview for "Die Welt (german) that there have not been and there will not be any XCP releases in Europe. But that does not exclude other types of copyprotection.

Thanks Dan, So whoever wants a copy of the Fantasy 2004 PDF catalogue should send me a personal message. I will reply with the link. It's a 24MB zip file.

Welcome to the Sony BMG XCP Exchange program http://www.upsrow.com/sonybmg/

CD woes may have had roots in merger (USA Today)

I thought I had seen a statement, but it was by SonyBMG Germany. In the middle of the "Sonygate", SonyBMG Europe has stated that they want to have a "fair" copyprotection system for Europe, allowing for a limited number of copies. That is the purpose of XCP (allowing for 3 copies, unlike EMI's scheme which makes CDs uncopyable). But with the current DRM-free computers and operating systems, it is technically impossible to have a protection limiting the number of copies without seriously tampering with the user's PCs by installing low-level DRM software. Sony BMG Copy Protection System Comes to Europe The article is from November 11, when Sony US was still hoping to solve the problem with their rootkit uninstaller. Now they have gone further and are recalling the XCP CDs in the US, so it is extremely unlikely that the same CDs will be introduced in Europe. It would be commercial suicide.

Here are some user reviews of Imation discs, some of which manufactured in India: http://www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia.php?selectmedia=2753

Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit By Bruce Schneier http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69601,00.html 02:00 AM Nov. 17, 2005 PT It's a David and Goliath story of the tech blogs defeating a mega-corporation. On Oct. 31, Mark Russinovich broke the story in his blog: Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers. This software tool is run without your knowledge or consent -- if it's loaded on your computer with a CD, a hacker can gain and maintain access to your system and you wouldn't know it. The Sony code modifies Windows so you can't tell it's there, a process called "cloaking" in the hacker world. It acts as spyware, surreptitiously sending information about you to Sony. And it can't be removed; trying to get rid of it damages Windows. This story was picked up by other blogs (including mine), followed by the computer press. Finally, the mainstream media took it up. The outcry was so great that on Nov. 11, Sony announced it was temporarily halting production of that copy-protection scheme. That still wasn't enough -- on Nov. 14 the company announced it was pulling copy-protected CDs from store shelves and offered to replace customers' infected CDs for free. But that's not the real story here. It's a tale of extreme hubris. Sony rolled out this incredibly invasive copy-protection scheme without ever publicly discussing its details, confident that its profits were worth modifying its customers' computers. When its actions were first discovered, Sony offered a "fix" that didn't remove the rootkit, just the cloaking. Sony claimed the rootkit didn't phone home when it did. On Nov. 4, Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG's president of global digital business, demonstrated the company's disdain for its customers when he said, "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" in an NPR interview. Even Sony's apology only admits that its rootkit "includes a feature that may make a user's computer susceptible to a virus written specifically to target the software." However, imperious corporate behavior is not the real story either. This drama is also about incompetence. Sony's latest rootkit-removal tool actually leaves a gaping vulnerability. And Sony's rootkit -- designed to stop copyright infringement -- itself may have infringed on copyright. As amazing as it might seem, the code seems to include an open-source MP3 encoder in violation of that library's license agreement. But even that is not the real story. It's an epic of class-action lawsuits in California and elsewhere, and the focus of criminal investigations. The rootkit has even been found on computers run by the Department of Defense, to the Department of Homeland Security's displeasure. While Sony could be prosecuted under U.S. cybercrime law, no one thinks it will be. And lawsuits are never the whole story. This saga is full of weird twists. Some pointed out how this sort of software would degrade the reliability of Windows. Someone created malicious code that used the rootkit to hide itself. A hacker used the rootkit to avoid the spyware of a popular game. And there were even calls for a worldwide Sony boycott. After all, if you can't trust Sony not to infect your computer when you buy its music CDs, can you trust it to sell you an uninfected computer in the first place? That's a good question, but -- again -- not the real story. It's yet another situation where Macintosh users can watch, amused (well, mostly) from the sidelines, wondering why anyone still uses Microsoft Windows. But certainly, even that is not the real story. The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us. Initial estimates are that more than half a million computers worldwide are infected with this Sony rootkit. Those are amazing infection numbers, making this one of the most serious internet epidemics of all time -- on a par with worms like Blaster, Slammer, Code Red and Nimda. What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn't notice Sony's rootkit as it infected half a million computers? And this isn't one of those lightning-fast internet worms; this one has been spreading since mid-2004. Because it spread through infected CDs, not through internet connections, they didn't notice? This is exactly the kind of thing we're paying those companies to detect -- especially because the rootkit was phoning home. But much worse than not detecting it before Russinovich's discovery was the deafening silence that followed. When a new piece of malware is found, security companies fall over themselves to clean our computers and inoculate our networks. Not in this case. McAfee didn't add detection code until Nov. 9, and as of Nov. 15 it doesn't remove the rootkit, only the cloaking device. The company admits on its web page that this is a lousy compromise. "McAfee detects, removes and prevents reinstallation of XCP." That's the cloaking code. "Please note that removal will not impair the copyright-protection mechanisms installed from the CD. There have been reports of system crashes possibly resulting from uninstalling XCP." Thanks for the warning. Symantec's response to the rootkit has, to put it kindly, evolved. At first the company didn't consider XCP malware at all. It wasn't until Nov. 11 that Symantec posted a tool to remove the cloaking. As of Nov. 15, it is still wishy-washy about it, explaining that "this rootkit was designed to hide a legitimate application, but it can be used to hide other objects, including malicious software." The only thing that makes this rootkit legitimate is that a multinational corporation put it on your computer, not a criminal organization. You might expect Microsoft to be the first company to condemn this rootkit. After all, XCP corrupts Windows' internals in a pretty nasty way. It's the sort of behavior that could easily lead to system crashes -- crashes that customers would blame on Microsoft. But it wasn't until Nov. 13, when public pressure was just too great to ignore, that Microsoft announced it would update its security tools to detect and remove the cloaking portion of the rootkit. Perhaps the only security company that deserves praise is F-Secure, the first and the loudest critic of Sony's actions. And Sysinternals, of course, which hosts Russinovich's blog and brought this to light. Bad security happens. It always has and it always will. And companies do stupid things; always have and always will. But the reason we buy security products from Symantec, McAfee and others is to protect us from bad security. I truly believed that even in the biggest and most-corporate security company there are people with hackerish instincts, people who will do the right thing and blow the whistle. That all the big security companies, with over a year's lead time, would fail to notice or do anything about this Sony rootkit demonstrates incompetence at best, and lousy ethics at worst. Microsoft I can understand. The company is a fan of invasive copy protection -- it's being built into the next version of Windows. Microsoft is trying to work with media companies like Sony, hoping Windows becomes the media-distribution channel of choice. And Microsoft is known for watching out for its business interests at the expense of those of its customers. What happens when the creators of malware collude with the very companies we hire to protect us from that malware? We users lose, that's what happens. A dangerous and damaging rootkit gets introduced into the wild, and half a million computers get infected before anyone does anything. Who are the security companies really working for? It's unlikely that this Sony rootkit is the only example of a media company using this technology. Which security company has engineers looking for the others who might be doing it? And what will they do if they find one? What will they do the next time some multinational company decides that owning your computers is a good idea? These questions are the real story, and we all deserve answers. - - - Bruce Schneier is the CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. You can contact him through his website.

This is the disc: http://www.tanieplyty.pl/product_info.php?products_id=1538 http://www.musicweb-international.com/ency...aedia/h/H91.HTM

http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/ November 16, 2005 To Our Valued Customers: You may be aware of the recent attention given to the XCP content protection software included on some SONY BMG CDs. This software was provided to us by a third-party vendor, First4Internet. Discussion has centered on security concerns raised about the use of CDs containing this software. We share the concerns of consumers regarding these discs, and we are instituting a program that will allow consumers to exchange any CD with XCP software for the same CD without copy protection. We also have asked our retail partners to remove all unsold CDs with XCP software from their store shelves and inventory. We will make further details of this program available shortly. We deeply regret any inconvenience this may cause our customers and we are committed to making this situation right. It is important to note that the issues regarding these discs exist only when they are played on computers, not on conventional, non-computer-based CD and/or DVD players. Our new initiatives follow the measures we have already taken, including last week’s voluntary suspension of the manufacture of CDs with the XCP software. In addition, to address security concerns, we provided to major software and anti-virus companies a software update, which also may be downloaded at http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html. We will shortly provide a simplified and secure procedure to uninstall the XCP software if it resides on your computer. Ultimately, the experience of consumers is our primary concern, and our goal is to help bring our artists’ music to as broad an audience as possible. Going forward, we will continue to identify new ways to meet demands for flexibility in how you and other consumers listen to music. The heck, just release normal CDs like you have been doing for 20 years, discs that can be played in every CD player, on the PC, and that can be converted to MP3s to listen to on portable players. That's all the flexibility the consumer needs.

AFAIK, there were no SonyBMG XCP releases in Europe so far. Sony had planned to introduce them in 2006, but has now abandonned these plans. Given the controversy over copyprotection in general, I don't think any label can put protected CDs on the market without informing the buyer.

Sony's 'Rootkit' Is on 500,000 Systems, Expert Says Interesting how this figures were estimated:

No, I am not! But I would like someone to confirm if and how they're marked, before I pick any of them up! ← According to this website, the CDs are marked: http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/Sony-BMG/

I wonder if the current Sony XCP copyprotection disaster could create another reason for a delay. If the box set was pressed with XCP, Sony wouldn't want to release it that way. Tthey are now replacing XCPs in stores, even recalling them from buyers.

You check them on amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0009XT8LA/ Gerry Mulligan - Jeru [CONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED CD] [ENHANCED] [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED]

Flurin, are you sure these CDs are not marked in any way?

Thanks for your input, Kevin. I'm only trying to find technical explanations to what I hear. On the Moncur Select it is obvious to me that something must have been done to the sound, as it is very unnatural. There is no hiss, and some musical information like the horn's or cymbals' overtones are missing. The "Bout' Soul" tracks have occasional distortion which is not present on the previous Connoisseur remastering he did. That's why my first thought was that NoNoise was used. I've observed the same sound signature on the latest Chet Baker remasters. It's not that the remastering has just a different tonal balance, which on the side of the listener is often a question of personal preference or system synergy. There is something missing. I can understand that for many people those latest remasters sound good enough, but I don't think anyone would prefer them to the previous versions.

That's quite remarkable for a disc that is illegal in the US.