Nora Jones new CD -- Copy Protection -- YIKES

I believe Circuit City advertised it for $11.99 for this week.

Good news - the Norah Jones CD is not copy protected. The problem is that the Bandlink software can get a little weird and break windows media player. After a few calls to Blue note somebody finally gave my number to Cedric at CDIntelligence, the distributer for the Bandlink software. He was very polite and knowledgable and after about 20 minutes I was able to figure out how to get it to play. On some windows xp PC's you might have to disable autorun to prevent then Bandlink software from launching. After I did this (in the registry - don't go there) the CD booted up fine and I was able to play it. I was even able to rip it to my music hard drive.

Blue Note (EMI) is taking a different approach to preventing illegal copying. They are giving you extra content to encourage you to buy the CD. In fact, if you intall the Bandlink software, you can get access to a bonus track and other material.

I was surprised to have someone call me at 7pm to help me with my problem. I didn't expect to have anyone return my call. Especially from a big record company like EMI.

Anyway, I hope this helps other people that were having the same issue.

Best Buy - $9.99 this week.

Time to get the MD or the old, warm sounding analogue decks out. If all of this is due to encoding/anti ripping schemes of several newly released commercial discs, then what will the purpose of buying $300 worth of portable MP3 players, where we will not be able to upload the songs we rightfully bought? Not everything modern is necessarily free of headaches.

That si good news Prpixel. I like to hear things like this. I have bben a strong advocate for lables giving the consumer something extra for their money to encourage them to buy theri product as opposed to copy protecting it. The Eminiem cd "The Eminiem Show" came with a free dvd with purchase. That is awesome. I cannot think of any other examples but I know others are doing this as well....an extra track is a cool thing to give. It is good to know they care about their customer service.