Bringing Yourself Up to Speed with AAC, MP3, and Digital Audio - If You Can’t Play It on Any CD Player, It’s Not a CD (Page 15 of 16 ) As you learned in “Understand Ripping, Encoding, and ‘Copying’,” earlier in this chapter, most audio CDs use the Red Book format, while others use the CD Extra format (a subset of Red Book) to put non-audio data on the CD as well. Philips and Sony defined Red Book in 1980. (The standard was published in a red binder—hence the name. Subsequent standards include Orange Book and Yellow Book—three guesses why.) Red Book ensures the disc will work with all drives that bear the Compact Disc logo and entitles the disc to bear the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo. How to Recognize Copy-Protected Discs Copy-protected discs won’t play on all CD drives and, so, technically and legally are not CDs. You should be able to recognize them as follows: - The discs shouldn’t bear the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo (because they’re not CDs), but some do. And in any case, many Red Book CDs don’t bear this logo, usually for reasons of label design or laziness.
- The disc may carry a disclaimer, warning, or notice such as “Will not play on PC or Mac,” “This CD [sic] cannot be played on a PC/Mac,” “Copy Control,” or “Copy Protected.”
- The disc won’t play on your computer, or it will play but won’t rip.
How to... Eject Stuck Audio Disks If you insert a non-CD audio disc into your CD drive and your PC or Mac can’t handle it, you may be unable to eject the disc. The PC or Mac may hang. If your computer is a Mac, and you restart it with the disc in the CD drive, your Mac may start up to a gray screen. On PCs and some Macs, you can use the manual eject hole on the CD drive to eject the disc. Straighten one end of a sturdy paper clip and push it into the hole to eject the disk. If your Mac doesn't have a manual eject hole, don't go prodding the wrong hole. Instead, follow as many of these steps as necessary to fix the problem: - Restart your Mac. If it's too hung to restart by conventional means, press the Reset button (if it has one), or hold down COMMAND, CTRL, and the power button. At the system startup sound, hold down the mouse button until your Mac finishes booting. This action may eject the disc.
- If you're using System 9 and have Mac OS X installed, restart your Mac and boot Mac OS X. Again, if your Mac is too hung to restart by conventional means, press the Reset button, or hold down COMMAND, CTRL, and the power button. At the system startup sound, hold down X to boot Mac OS C. Open iTunes from the dock or the Applications folder, and then click the Ehect button.
- Restart your Mac. Once again, if it's too hung to restart by conventional means, press the Reset button, or hold down COMMAND, CTRL, and the powe button. At the system startup sound, hold down COMMAND-OPTION-O-F to boot to the Open Firmware mode. You'll see a prompt screen that contains something like the text shown in here (the exact text varies depending on the model of Mac):
Type eject cd and press RETURN. If all is well, the CD drive will open. If not, you may see the message "read of block0 failed. can't OPEN the EJECT device." Either way, type mac-boot and press RETURN to reboot your Mac.
If Open Firmware more won't fix the problem, you'll need to take your mac to a service shop. |
 This is chapter three of How to Do Everything with Your iPod & iPod Mini, by Guy Hart-Davis (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, ISBN 0072254521, 2004). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
Buy this book now. |
Next: What Happens when You Try to Use a Copy-Protected Disc on a Computer >>
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