Do As Infinity - Do the Live 12 March 2003
Everybody knows Do As Infinity, right? I mean, they released their eleventh studio album a week ago. What I’m uploading tonight is Do the Live, their first live album, a two-disc release that came out in 2003. I don’t have anything to say about the band or the music that everyone doesn’t already know. But you guys know how I like to ramble. And ripping this album reminded me of something from the early 2000’s which I’d completely forgotten about: CCCD.

This is about to get really boring if you don’t care about technology….

CCCD was a form of “Copy Control” that Avex Trax—Do As Infinity’s label—started using in 2002. Napster had launched just a few years prior, in 1999, and the music industry was experimenting with ways to prevent music piracy. CCCD was one of those experiments, and Avex Trax used it on Do the Live. If you look at the contents of the discs with ripping software you’ll see that each has an additional, long track at the end. For the first disc it’s twenty-six minutes, and thirty-one minutes for the second. These tracks have intentionally corrupted data that not all programs can rip; I had to use cdparanoia to do it because the ripping software I typically use errored out on those tracks. These corrupted tracks were able to confuse both some amount of ripping software and disc-drive hardware itself, and interestingly could degrade the audio quality of an attempted rip. But that’s not all. Those two tracks also contain some amount of code that older versions of Windows would trigger as part of its ‘autorun’ facility; other operating systems just ignore it. That code, which was not present on all forms of CCCD, existed to affect Windows Media Player. Or in some cases contained an entire media player itself; this was done on discs where the so-called “Blue Book” data was hidden and/or obfuscated, which made normal media players unable to determine the track layout and thus play the disc.

Long story short: all use of CCCD died a few years later because people inevitably got around it. But until I dug out my copy of Do the Live and saw the little CCCD logo on the case—I’d forgotten this ever existed.

Anyway, enjoy the album everyone!