Celine Dion's New CD Won't Play on Computers! (The Wave of Future CDs?)

The Hollywood Reporter ^ | April 3, 2002 | Chris Marlowe

[Recovering_Democrat]

Celine Dion's latest release is generating heated discussions on Internet message boards. But the subject under fire is not the star's music -- it's that the CD will not play on computer CD drives. Epic/Sony released "A New Day Has Come" embedded with Key2Audio copy protection in Germany and several other European countries. According to a spokeswoman for Sony Music Entertainment, it is clearly stated on the front of the booklet and on the back of the jewel box that the CD "will not play on a PC or a Mac" in the language of the country in which it is sold. Besides those notices, which the spokeswoman said were readable before purchase, the disc itself bears the same warning. Should the consumer try to play Dion's CD on a PC or Macintosh, the computer likely will crash. (Chris Marlowe)

[Recovering_Democrat]

An interesting comeback by the recording industry. Will the "fix" be hacked? Just wondering.

[demlosers]

Oh yeah, until somebody hacks the code.

[EggsAckley]

Napster, the Sequel

[SunStar]

that the CD "will not play on a PC or a Mac"

Then it is not a 'CD'. Just ask Phillips, the creator of the format.

[Dimensio]

An interesting comeback by the recording industry. Will the "fix" be hacked? Just wondering.

The appopriate solution in this kind of situation is to rip a WAV file copy of every track from the CD (preferrably by using the digital output of a console CD player to a digital input of a PC sound device) and mail them, one by one and uncompressed, to every Sony music executive you can identify.

In this case the broken/defective CDs are only being sold in Europe, so the solution is best tried when it is a CD that is only released in a defective form.

[MarkWar]

>Celine Dion's New CD Won't Play on Computers

Do people with computers want to play Celine Dion CDs?!

Mark W.

[Keeper of the Turf]

The whole album is already available on WinMX.

[Tokhtamish]

So apparently we are seeing the same region encoding with CD's that we have long had with DVD's.

Logical when the people who own the record companies also own CD technology.

[NormsRevenge]

Dittoes.... Celine Dion couldn't sing to get the cows to come home ... What a pile of over-hyped "talent"

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

Thinking back to the eighties, I seem to remember the movie industry trying a VHS copy protection system. I don't know if it ever came to the US. It seems that the protected tapes would only play on new high end machines, but on cheap or older VCR's the tapes wouldn't due to the copy protection kicking in. The video stores on Guam were going nuts over people bringing back these "unplayable" tapes. I think it cost the maunfactures a good amount of money as they had to eat the cost of getting rid of this idea.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

LOL! The only person who likes her is her old-ass husband!

[dogbyte12]

Celine Dion's new CD won't play on my computer, my boom box, my home audio center, my car CD, my work player, etc...

[randog]

Will the "fix" be hacked? Just wondering.

Us electrical engineers have a saying--Anything that can be scrambled can be un-scrambled.

[July 4th]

preferrably by using the digital output of a console CD player to a digital input of a PC sound device

They can't stop everyone from converting a music file to MP3. Someone, somewhere has the hardware to do it. I have a digital out on my CD player. If I had a digital-in on my computer, I could have the whole CD in MP3 format in 15 minutes. Once one person gets the conversion done, that's all you need! The file's propagated across the internet in minutes.

So then what's the point of the new format? I honestly couldn't tell you. Pure inconvenience I guess... I just did a search on KaZaA for some of the new songs from the Celine album just to see if they were there. They are.

[DoughtyOne]

Do people with computers want to play Celine Dion CDs?!

[martin_fierro]

It may already be cracked.

[DoughtyOne]

Ditto!

[Wolfie]

Now if they could just come up with one that won't play at all.

[martin_fierro]

I just did a search on KaZaA for some of the new songs from the Celine album just to see if they were there. They are.

Make sure that you also get rid of that little Trojan Horse that comes with KaZaA.