Readers with long memories and sharp attention spans might recall that a couple of weeks ago, Bitscape was so impressed with some of the music he had downloaded from a P2P network, after hearing a few samples of the artist on a now defunct radio station, he decided to purchase a complete high quality legal copy of the music online.

First, the good. DJ Armin Van Buuren's Boundries of Imagination album is awesome. It features a long continuous stream of high energy mixes of various songs created by Armin Van Buuren under other project pseudonyms. (For naming convention, think Michael Cretu with Enigma, except with Armin Van Buuren, almost every song seems to be associated a different band name. But this cd is a compilation of all these different "bands", which actually all had the same artist behind them in the first place.)

While I was ordering Boundries of Imagination, I decided to throw in Perpetuous Dreamer's The Sound of Goodbye (yes, same guy, even though the song features a female vocalist) maxi-single, since I absolutely love that song.

Last week, I recieved a package from Amazon.com with both discs, and was happy. (#include <bad_amazon_patent_policy.h>; Normally, I don't order from them. For this item, it was either Amazon, or pay twice as much and/or overseas shipping. So I have allowed myself to become morally tainted in the name of saving money. Maybe the tale I'm about to relate is my comeuppance. Or not?)

Friday, after ripping Boundries of Imagination into Argo's ogg repository, as I do with pretty much every cd I buy these days, I put in The Sound of Goodbye. It went through really fast, and ejected the cd within a couple minutes -- way to quick to have gotten the whole thing. Indeed, the directory that should have contained the album only had one file. I checked the console for error messages, and saw several about how the encoder couldn't find the temporary wav files. Was I running out of disk space? /home was running a little low, but still had several hundred megs left. Strange.

I needed to go, so I left it as a problem to investigate later.

Tonight, I got back to it. Deleted some crap to make sure there would be plety of disc space, and tried ripping again. The first track ripped fine, but after that, the same errors happened again. Time for serious debug mode.

I narrowed the problem down to cdparanoia, and convinced it to give me more output about what was happening. The following error message appeared: "Selected span contains non audio tracks. Aborting."

Strange. I googled, and didn't come up with anything conclusive, except for one other person in a mailing list archive who had seen the same error. The replies from developers amounted to: We don't have a clue. Bad cd maybe?

I had managed to successfully play the disc on my dvd player at mom's house earlier, so that was something. Adding more verbose output from cdparanoia about the disc indicated that it thought the cd only had 3 tracks, when it should have 5, and the 2nd and 3rd were of 0 length.

Then I looked at the fine print on the inside of the insert.

"This disc incorporates Copy Control technology. This disc is designed to be compatible with CD audio players, DVD players and PCs with OS Windows 95 Pentium 2 233 Mhz, 64 Mb RAM or higher. This technology prevents the consumer from making digital copies."

I had been duped. I searched the cdparanoia man page for options that might possibly ignore or override a faulty table of contents, but nothing obvious jumped out at me. Yes, if I worked hard enough at it, I could hack it. If nothing else, run it through an analog input, and encode my oggs from there. But that felt distinctly wrong.

Here I was, a consumer who had gone out of my way to pay for the music I wanted to listen to. In truth, I had already downloaded most of the tracks in mp3 format from Limewire, but liked this music enough that I wanted my own high quality copies, as well as a way to show my apprecation to the people who had made it. I especially think that honesty is important for artists such as this one, who are slightly less mainstream and aren't already sitting on buckets of cash, ala Britney and friends.

But now, I felt like I was the one who had been cheated. Thanks RIAA. Now I've learned my lesson about paying for music. Next time, I won't bother. If you're going go out of your way to make it hard for me when I try to buy from you, I won't bother. I'll just fire up Limewire and hunt until I find mp3s that are of sufficient quality.

At this point, I decided that rather than try to hack it further, I would revert to dumb consumer mode. "Waaaaah! Music not work. Me want money back! Waaaaah!"

I went back to the Amazon. Since I seldom purchase from them, much less try to return anything, I wasn't sure what recourse I might have. To Amazon's credit, the return page was fairly easy to locate. They may have an awful record with patents, but they do know how to design an intuitive web interface. I found the record of my order, and got to a page to return merchandise.

Reason? I selected, "Product was defective/damaged when it arrived." I put a brief note in the comment box describing how it would not work on my computer's drive. No details, or rants about copy protections. (Remember: Dumb consumer wants everything to work perfectly out of the box, and can't be bothered with debugging what's really wrong. Baby going to cwy. "Waaaaaah!")

They gave me a nice little form -- postage paid -- to print out, and send via the postal service. I contemplated for a moment whether I wanted a "Refund" or "Replacement". I would like a working copy of the disc, and wouldn't mind paying for it, but somehow, I have a strong suspicion that any replacement would be just as defective as this one. I opted for the least hassle. "Refund Please."

I should get my money back 7-14 days after they receive the return.

Meanwhile, I'm keeping Boundries of Imagination, since it rips and plays just fine, and sounds gorgeous.

But honestly, this experience makes me rethink whether I want to to ever purchase legal music cds again, even for stuff I really love and wouldn't mind paying for. Though of course I had heard much of the hype about corrupt cds before, this is the first time I personally have run into any trouble with it. There's nothing that drives RIAA hate home like having an intentionally defective product delivered to my door.