Foreign CD

My friend lent me a chinese CD the other day. It works great in my car and CD-player, but when I tried to copy the tracks onto my lap top (via iTunes) the thing just can’t read it. I am confused. What could I being doing wrong? I may try another computer and see if it’s just me, but still, any idea what I can do? Thanks.

PS: no I can’t tell you the name of the CD or band, it’s in chinese and I am monolingual.

WAG: it’s copy protected (I suppose that’s odd considering the view that most people have of CDs coming from China). Of course, that may mean you shouldn’t be copying it, especially if it’s not yours.

Yeah, but I don’t mean that. My computer wouldn’t even play the darn thing. It’s damn frustrating that it works fine with my walkman, but I can’t even play it on the computer. Other CDs work just fine, maybe it’s just because it’s chinese or something, I don’t know.

Some copy protection methods render CDs unusable by computers, so what you describe is no surprise.

To PLAY it sometimes this trick helps:

  1. turn off all autoplay functions of Windows.

  2. put the CD in the drive (DO NOT CLOSE IT!)

  3. press the PLAY button on your CD drive. (This will close the drive.)

The CD should then start to play. If not, or if your drive doesn’t have a PLAY button, then you’re out of luck.

cu

I think it might be a DVD. There are different global standards and need various codex for different DVD’s. DVD players read these different standards, and the US one might not be configured for a China one.

I loved getting some legal and expensive DVD’s from the US, and then they wouldn’t play in China. Of course the $1 pirate knockoffs are fine. :o

If it were a DVD, it wouldn’t work in a car CD player.

I think it makes perfect sense. Since there’s so much illicit copying in China, I’d expect Chinese record companies to be even more… um, gung-ho… about copy protection than American companies are.

The disc could be so cheaply/badly replicated that the computer’s drive simply can’t deal with it. Parameters such as reflectivity, radial deviation, birefringence, etc. can be so poor and out of specification as to be unplayable on some drives.