A colleague at work told me that her son refuses to let people copy his CDs because, in his words, “it leaves a band around the outside of the disc, and you can tell it’s been copied”.
Does this sound likely? I can’t work out how the act of ripping a CD would cause any physical changes to the CD itself - these are original shop-bought CDs, btw.
Would it perhaps occur if the CD is ripped in a CD/RW drive, rather than read-only?
This has vexed me mightly, for I can see no way it can happen.
There isn’t much in-depth enlightenment to give. It simply isn’t true. Like you said, how would that work with a non-writeable drive? Normal store bought CD’s aren’t writeable at all. The CD drive only needs to read them to copy files to the hard drive.
He might be talking about copy-protected discs (which are not Compact Disc standards-compliant) - some of these work by the inclusion of an additional, unreadable (i.e deliberately corrupt) track that is ignored by domestic CD players, but that confuses computer CD drives and renders the whole disc unreadable.
I have heard of people circumventing this method by obscuring the last track (which will be at or towards the outside) with a magic marker. It’s a bad idea, IMO - much better just not to buy from companies that don’t press standards-compliant media.
Another alternative is that he says that because he just doesn’t want to promote intellectual property theft and doesn’t particularly care to debate his reasons.
If he thinks he is seeing a band around the outside of his CD, I’d guess what he is really seeing is the unused part of the CD. CD’s are recorded from the center out. Any unused space can be seen as a shinier, slightly darker band around the outside. I’m often surprised by how much of a CD isn’t used by some artists. I want my 74 minutes of music, darn it.
