Attention, Covenant fans:

[reddragdiva]

Unlike the European edition of Northern Light on Sony, the US edition on Metropolis is apparently not copy-corrupted and does not feature the Macintosh-wrecking Key2Audio rubbish. Time for a mail order.

Comments

[naughtypixie.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiousity... it's not just iMacs that are affected, we've had 12 desktop G4's so far knackered by this. 9 we reclaimed via fiddling with firmware, 3 we managed to get the disks out (horribly voiding the warrenty) by actually physically removing the disk then flushing it with a fresh version of the firmware that it had scrambled.

fun.

[reddragdiva]

Fixed.

Did you send a bill to Sony?

[naughtypixie.livejournal.com]

Sadly, our in house tech did the dismantling as a favour and I did the firmware diddling, consequently the cost was, in actual monetary exchange on paper terms, nothing (real cost was my time and his, but we both enjoyed it and I considered it a personal challenge from sony).

We did send off a rude letter to sony for each event, and i've managed to convinced 3 of our titles so far to run "why copy protection is pointless and damaging" articles simply because we won't let the whiney bastards play music CD's anymore as they're too stupid to read labels (not to mention staying in touch with the world enough to learn about the unlabled ones).

[reddragdiva]

"i've managed to convinced 3 of our titles so far to run "why copy protection is pointless and damaging" articles"

Heh. Sony picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel :-)

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

There's a fix (http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120166) for SuperDrive Macs, though I haven't had the bad luck to have run into one of these malformed "CDs" so haven't tested it.

(Doesn't let you play, just lets you eject the thing.)

[naughtypixie.livejournal.com]

true, however anyone who still is using macs in publishing will be on os 9 (which is unsupported by that FAQ) as that demon program called quark still does not run to an effective level under OS X. Much as i'd love all my designers to move to indesign and OS X, it's not happening soon.

Out of curiousity though, if you do happen to run across one of the affected CD's in combination with an effected mac, be warned that the other apple technote (which i'm actually too tipsy to be bothered looking up at the moment) which noted how to get effected CD's out of the drive, lies! Sometimes it works... sometimes you are supposed to return said drive to apple (or ask nice favours from tech support companies with apple warranty non voiding contracts).