I know this is not an Audacity issue but thought maybe someone here was also having similar issues with audio files.
3 of the new CDs I have bought recently have had problems
only John Barleycorn and Court and Spark old used, old new worked ok
I still believe it is a DRM issue but will have to see
Are they Sony Records and Tapes? I believe, from fuzzy memory, that Sony was the only one who ever seriously used copy protection. It did not go well.
Do they play on a stand-alone CD player?
Do they look like perfect factory CDs? Color paint job and silvery (not orangy or tan) data side? Factory pressed disks have billions of tiny dots pressed into an aluminum layer. They’re silver. Home burned CD-R disks burn tiny data holes in a dye layer similar to color photography. Don’t leave a home burned disk beside or under a sunny window.
I don’t recognize that data pattern.
It’s easy to screw up an Audio CD. The sound, while perfect quality WAV, is not in WAV format. That was too wasteful. So it’s streaming with an address track to tell the player where everything is. It’s a snap to mess up this addressing scheme. One other note. Audio CDs don’t have song titles. The Player goes on-line and tries to figure it out. It can get it wrong.
The song titles in my car (with no intertnet) are TRACK-1, TRACK-2, etc.
As Koz wrote in an earlier post, Sony was the only major label to implement wide spread copy protection to CD’s.
(There may have been smaller “players” but not sure).
Anyways, the Sony system was very insidious in that it copied/loaded some software onto your computer if played on it.
It also would not allow ripping as they implemented some tricks with messing the TOC (table of contents) which is track 0
on all music CD’s.
This was during the heydays of Windows 98 and was not only an invasion of privacy but in some cases, the software would go
wonky and crash your OS.
Some countries, also allow the owner of a bought tape/CD/DVD to make one archival copy for personal use for backup purposes.
That right was taken away by them.
I was one of the many that was affected by this and swore to never use any Sony product ever again.
Decades later, a studio complex I was working at, decided it was time for upgrading.
It was my call as to which supplier/s we would get cameras, mixing desks, CGens, etc from.
If you have a standalone CD/DVD player with Toslink (optical) output and a soundcard with optical input…well, you know what I mean.
You could also use the RCA outputs and line inputs but, that would mean going from digital to analog and back again, which is not ideal
and will degrade the quality.