SafeAudio explained and should we fear it ?


 


SafeAudio, you probably already heard about it. It's the music industries latest technology to make sure they will get their money from the public.

I've never seen a industry that is so keen on money and tries in any way to protect it's products so desperately. Since they have stopped Napster they are disliked by more and more people, but they don't seem to care.

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Macrovision

SafeAudio is an Audio CD protection developed by Macrovision. This Californian company has become famous by their VHS and CD (SafeDisc) protections. Both have been cracked, but do what they are designed for, protect the contents of media, or at least make it as difficult as possible to duplicate it. Of course most of the CD Freaks visitors are able to bypass the protections, but the average home user will not.

Altough SafeAudio is rather easy to bypass I think Macrovision can already market it as a success as it seems a lot of record companies have adopted the technology. Soon Macrovision will publish their results and I'm very curious how much they've made this year.

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Think about this, Macrovision only excists because there are people like us that like to backup their music. Thinking of that, they should very happy with us .

Watermarking ?

A technology to prevent consumers from backing up is watermarking, this means that the digital signal of audio will contain a signal that marks it as an copy. SafeAudio does not work this way. Watermarking is controversial as in tests good ears could say whether an audio track was marked or not, thus the quality of the audio was degraded.

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SafeAudio protects a CD only from ripping. This means that converting your CD to MP3/WMA files should be impossible. Stupid of course, as there are MP3 players on the market, just like a walk/disc man that you can carry around and for those you NEED to convert your CD's.

The technology

So SafeAudio is no watermark, but does protect the contents of a CD from ripping, what's the trick ?

Macrovision likes to use the CD standards to it's limit's as it does with SafeDisc 2, also SafeAudio has some tricks to fool your CD player.

During the production of SafeAudio, the production plant will change some of the error correction data of the CD. Error correction is besides the actual content very important for a CD. The smallest scratch or piece of dust will create gaps in the music but your CD player is able, due error correction methods, to replace these gaps with the actual music and you won't notice your CD player is doing it !

SafeAudio changes the so called EFM code on the CD. Easily said; EFM code makes sure the CD can be played in normal conditions, it is part of the error correction system that is used on audio CD's. Errors in (this)data can easily be repaired by a CD player in both your hifi set as your computer when playing audio CD's.

If you want to rip this data however - (transfering it to your HD)- these errors will not be corrected by your HD as only a CD player know how to do this, resulting in gaps and bad noises in the audio.

Macrovision and TTR (that started developing this technology) say that the error corrections that are done while you play a CD in your normal CD player/computer can not be heard, for now there is no reason to believe they are wrong.

The main questions rises, can we bypass it ?


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