I just bought the new Sheryl Crow and Moby discs. Obviously, now that I have my awesome new toy, I don't have a cd player in my car anymore. So I tried to rip these discs the way I have my entire music collection (using EAC) and on loading the discs I get the following error: at CDDB.594 -> WHOLE-OVERFLOW. It then shuts down EAC. Burning old discs doesn't seem to be a problem. So I'm wondering if this is the new fangled copy protection I've been hearing about that causes some computers to lock up. Anyone know? If so, is there a way around it yet? It's pretty irritating to not be able to listen to music I purchased the way I want to.

This isn't entirely related, but I hadn't ripped a CD with EAC in a while. When I went to rip one the other day, I got the same exact error. Didn't know what it was, but it would give me the error, then shut down.

I went to the EAC website, downloaded the new version and installed it. Everything worked fine again.

I know what you mean. I was in the same situation a few months ago and I felt....well...cheated. There I was, with a legally bought Cd and I wasn't even able to do with it what I wanted to (namely ripping it and putting the mp3's on my Empeg)

Well, with a little help from a friend I was able to override the protection. Remember : any protection can be broken.

First step :
Get Clony XXL here. It's a little program that scans cd's and tells if there's some kind of protection on the Cd and what kind of protection it is.
Once you know what kind of protection it is, then you can dig deeper to find a way to override it.

I can't speak for your particular situation, but my personal copy of the new Sheryl Crow album ripped fine and is not copy protected. It could easily be your drive, your software, your system, or a defective disc.

Check out Andy McFadden's CD Recordable FAQ for a good discussion of the various protection schemes. I think he reminds everyone that "just because you can't rip it doesn't mean it's protected."

Thanks guys for your tips. As it turned out, downloading the new version of EAC did the trick. The only reason I wondered if there was some new copy protection is because it was only happening with CDs released in last couple of months. I don't know if it was a coincidence or if the newer EAC addressed the copy protection (if there was any), but in either case, all seems to be well for now, so thanks all for the advice.

I've seen that OVERFLOW message from EAC before. Usually, just restarting EAC and re-ripping the remaining tracks fixes it. It tends to get worse if you've ripped a bunch of CDs in a big batch. I haven't seen the message since I upgraded EAC, though.

The latest version of EAC ripped my copy of the new Moby album fine, anyway.

The CD's that DO have the new copy protection, are clearly labled as such. They have to provide a label to let the consumer know that the audio disc will not play in your computer CD-ROM, and lots of "older" cd audio playing devices. What that copy protection does, is inserts a dummy track 01 with random data so that any drive that recognizes data on a CD will freak out. FAQ's all over the net about this copy protection.