This garble that is being put on the CD's, is this something that can be detected via a program? Or is it just one more thing to cause me wonder why a new rip sounds bad?

In theory, it should be so bad that the CD won't even play or rip at all in your CD-ROM drive.

But as I've maintained in other discussions on this subject, for this same reason, these protected CDs will refuse to play in some consumer CD players. They maintain that these discs will play in regular players, but they're lying. They know this will cause some players to eject the CD, they're gambling on "percentage of returns". They think that the amount of piracy stopped by this system will outweigh the number of people who take the disc back to the record stores.

Of course, they couldn't care less about the artist, who, if they'd bothered to ask, would say that they don't want any of their fans or potential fans to get alienated by this hassle.

Something else they're not thinking about is the fact that some CD-ROM drives will still read these copy-protected CDs. This will: a) increase sales of the "good" drives, and b) increase internet trading of the songs from the protected CDs as owners of the good drives post their copies on the 'net.

This is, of course, precisely the opposite effect of what they intended.

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Tony Fabris