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MediaMax Music CD DRM Woes
Category: Industry Buzz - June 29, 2005
By Alexander Grundner [29 Reads]
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Jason Dunn over at Digital Media Thoughts is ready to take a sledgehammer to his new MediaMax DRM protected music CD. Reason: MediaMax requires you to download their software in order to have PC playback – of course, ripping music from the CD is out of the question.

I put the CD into my computer and immediately a MediaMax installer pops up. I thought it was some lame "enhanced media player", so I declined the EULA installer - and it ejected the CD. How curious! I put it back in, left the EULA installer open, and fired up WMP10 to rip the CD. After the first few tracks ripped, I listened to one - and it was a mash of skips and distortions. My first DRM'd CD! I looked at the CD case, and sure enough, there's a paragraph on the back of the CD that explains that the CD is protected against "unauthorized copying" and the software needs to be installed in order to play the CD on a computer. It played fine in my wife's car, but you have to install the MediaMax software to listen to it on a PC - and you can't rip it. Interestingly enough there's also no CD logo anywhere on the case - Philips must have revoked their logo because it's not a compliant CD.


I had a somewhat similar experience with a CD where I could only listen to the tracks in a Flash player (similar to those InterVideo players) that popped up every time I loaded the CD on my PC. However, I was able to copy the tracks to a CD, but the application only allowed me to save them as 128Kbps WMA (Yuck!). Luckily, for me, Tower Records was kind enough to return it when I told them I couldn't playback the CD properly on my PC.

* Princeton University's Department of Computer Science has a more in-depth article on MediaMax CD3 if you want to investigate the story a little further.

http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/1106/mediamax_music_cd