Beating the man

Lately some of the cds I've been buying have been "copyright protected" with a data protection program encoded on the disc that prevents you from copying, ripping or doing anything but listen to the cd. Now I dont know about you but I like to rip my music onto the computer to listen to without having to pop the cd in everytime I want to hear it. Thankfully there are some programs out there that let you stick it to the man and reclaim your dominance over the digital media you so desire.

I used the Isobuster program to "recover" this "lost data" on my brand new Taproot cd, and I can report that it works pretty good. I had tried previous cd copying programs but this is a different program. This program actually treats the disc as if it were damaged and you were trying to recover lost data, bypassing the security that keeps you from copying the tracks. I've read that similar success from the Audiograbber program. Both of these run in the freeware mode, which is what I used.

Finally one last note. I came across the music section of Downloads.com recently and discovered there is a plethora of unknown musicians, in every genre of music you can think of, who post a handful of free .mp3s here. Check out Music.Downloads.com for more info and a shitload of free, albeit unknown music. And really there is a ton of good stuff in there if you look for it.