You can't stop the music

Copy-protected CDs are designed to curb large-scale piracy, but they also discourage file-swapping and home recording. Charles Arthur finds a solution

I was this close to buying the Foo Fighters' latest album the other day. (Don't worry, what follows will make sense even if you don't know who they are.) But then, uncharacteristically, I started to read the tiny print on the CD label. I don't know what I thought I'd find there: acknowledgements, aphorisms, perhaps a useful recipe. Instead it was a warning that the CD won't play in PCs or "gaming devices".

Something of a poser, that, since these days I buy CDs only in order to turn them into MP3s that I can listen to on my computer or portable MP3 player (in my case, an Apple iPod). I don't tout a portable CD player, because it's bulky, eats up batteries at a terrifying rate and severely limits the range of music you can take with you.

The reason the labels put out protected CDs is that they are certain that CD copying is undermining their business. Jay Berman, the chief executive of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), told the music industry's annual European conference last week that unless the labels put more effort into offering their own online subscription services, online file-swapping threatened all 600,000 music industry jobs in Europe.

Then again, Mr Berman and hyperbole are not exactly strangers, and it didn't help that Robbie Williams (a singer, m'lud, but not for the Foo Fighters) had said the day before that online file-sharing was "great" and that "there's nothing anyone can do about it".

I tend to agree with Williams; I bought the first Coldplay album on the strength of a couple of tracks I downloaded via Napster, which persuaded me they were a band worth listening to at greater length. All the evidence is that online file-swapping encourages people to sample, and often then to buy. And most Europeans are still on dialup connections, which make downloading a whole album (around 65Mb) a task only for the very, very patient.

Organised piracy by gangs operating CD factories, however, does pose a threat to the record labels, and it's entirely credible that if you buy such pirated discs you fund and encourage other criminal work. For this reason alone, don't buy suspiciously cheap CDs at car boot sales and elsewhere.

I'm less persuaded that individuals burning the occasional CD for each other is destroying an entire business. But that's how some record execs view it, and so they've gone down this anti-copying technology route.

All this still left me in the record shop looking at the Foo Fighters' album, trying to guess whether it would really work in my computer, and what I would do if I bought it and it didn't.

In the end I played safe and didn't buy it. But this can't be what the record industry wants. It's worse even than if I had bought an unprotected CD and made copies for friends, because one CD fewer has been sold, and nobody in my circle is being encouraged to buy the band's releases by listening to copies made for them.

It was only once I got home that I realised what I needed: a way to take the output of my hi-fi's CD player and turn it into a digital form that I could control. Then I could make an MP3 version of the album and load it up, leaving everyone happy.

For that you need some hardware that will do analogue-to-digital conversion. For me, the ideal was the Griffin iMic, which costs £35+VAT ($35/£21 in the US). You can plug a small stereo headphone-style cable into it from your hi-fi (ideally, from the tape outputs; cables are available in good hi-fi shops), and it will take that analogue input and convert it into a stream of bits at CD-quality (44kHz, 16-bit sampling) and pipe it into your computer's USB port. It works perfectly (no drivers required) with Windows XP and Apple Macs.

All you need then is some software to capture that stream. Whether you want to remix the music, tweak it, or whatever, you're sure to find something to suit your personal taste – free? shareware? commercial? – at the Shareware Music Machine (www.hitsquad.com/smm/).

This method also has the benefit that you can capture music trapped on vinyl before it turns to sludge. (Some recording software will help edit out the pops, crackles and rumble that are vinyl's trademarks.)

The only drawback of the whole process is that unlike "ripping" a CD into MP3, which can be done many times faster than you can listen to the tracks, this can only be done in real time. Yes, you'll actually have to listen to the music that you bought.

Which all means that all that's left for me to do is to go back to that shop and buy the Foo Fighters album. I'll just have to hope that the record label hasn't done its usual trick of releasing two great tracks as singles, to disguise an album of duds. That sort of thing can really turn buyers off, you know. They might even stop buying CDs.

Griffin iMic: contact AM Micro (www.ammicro.co.uk); Shareware Music Machine: www.hitsquad.com/smm/

In my column of 13 Jan, the details provided for the city guide Vindigo were wrong. The free trial lasts for 30 days (not seven), and the program costs $24.95 (£15) for an annual subscription or $3.50 (£2) per month for a monthly subscription (not $35/£21 annually). Apologies.