Today I bought my first CD with the CDS copy protection system on it, as much because I wanted to play with the copy protection as because I wanted the CD! (the CD is "O Irmão do Meio" by Sérgio Godinho - a well known Portuguese singer/songwriter). As an aside, whilst browsing in a music shop back here in Portugal I noticed that many, many more CDs are copy protected here than in the UK - I saw many protected CDs which are not protected in the UK. Probably because copying is a much bigger problem here than in the UK... Anyway, back to the copy protection. Well, first question: does it work? Well, no :D I made a pretty much perfect copy of it using Nero 5.5 at my first attempt - didn't even need to twiddle with any settings. I say "pretty much" because the only issue is a slight (very slight) glitch in the first track - that's it. That certainly won't put people off. Now to the details of the system. On the CD cover it says "Designed to play in CD players, DVD players and PCs - MS Windows 95, Pentium 2, 233Mhz, 64Mb RAM or superior, Mac OS 8.6 to 9 with the CarbonLib extension and Mac OS X". Well, it actually [i]doesn't[/i] play in my PC's DVD drive, at least not the way I would like it to. It gets about 15 seconds into the first track and then the player software (I tried several) just hangs and the disc is left spinning in the drive - eject is the only way out. Incidentally, the point at which it hangs is the same point that the "glitch" occurs in the copy I made. The copy, incidentally, [i]does[/i] play on my PC as a normal CD would :cool: Now, what they mean by PC compatible is that there's also a data track on the CD with audio player software that is set to auto-install (unless you stop it) :inferno: - and then play a heavily compressed version of the CD stored in a file called yucca.cds. They've messed with the CD directory aswell because the file appears to be 800Mb big which is clearly impossible. The entire data track is only 90Mb, containing the player software and the compressed audio file. I didn't attempt to see what happens if I let the "player" software install, presumably it would work but why am I paying for a 44.1kHz 16bit red-book CD when if I want to play it in my PC I have to listen to some barstardized compressed version? :grrr: I was btw, also able to rip the CD to MP3 no problem using CDEx so the copy protection hasn't done anything to prevent what it intended to prevent and just caused a lot of potential headaches for people who want to listen to it on their PCs. It isn't going to stop the guy who copies the odd CD for his mates and it's certainly not going to stop the industrial pirates - so what's the f*cking point!!! :inferno: The CD does play on my CD transport (Marantz CD50SE) so at least that part of it works :rolleyes: Michael.