listening to protected audio cds

[Alan Cox]

> http://www.amazon.com/Laundry-Service-Shakira/dp/B00005R2M3
> It's a purchased cd, works well in dedicated cd playes (car, desk) - and 

(pedantic - its not a CD)

> also works in windows (and can be ripped with audiograbber). I'm 
> reasonably sure no "drivers" have been installed - because autoplay is 
> disabled. Is there a way to check explicitly for any of that crap?

It would have a small iso9660 data or udf session if so.

> Whenever I insert it into a linux computer, it takes several minutes to 
> recognize that anything is even in the drive (at least, in KDE). After 
> the CD is recognized, the audio can be ripped, but has problems.
> I guess then my question is, why is it that windows/audiograbber can 
> play/rip the CD, but linux can't?

Some versions of that disc are certainly mangled. Its a disc I did
actually take a look at a long time ago as it was causing some IDE CD bug
reports which turned out to be CD firmware crashing not Linux. It amusing
played just fine/ripped just fine on an HP drive.

I would guess that the behaviour you see depends upon the way the drive
is queried or what the tools happen to do. Its also possible some windows
audio grabbing tools have hacks to defeat the copy protection on the
discs. For obvious reasons we can't ship such hacks in Fedora because US
legislators believe that the music industry is more important than the
people.