Kasabian

by

Kasabian

Edit

First off let me say that this band and album are excellent but the other glowing reviews should make that clear to you. I want to take this opportunity to warn everybody about the grossly unfair restrictions that BMG has put on this CD. I made the mistake of buying this CD and now I am screwed. I can only play it on a CD player. When I put this in my computer, it immediately crashed it so bad that it immediately rebooted and I'm running Windows XP. I know it was the CDs fault because when Windows booted back up and I ran the executable on the CD, it immediately crashed again. But that isn't the worst of it... like millions of others, I have stopped listening to CDs and prefer using an iPod or my computer for listening to MP3s. Well these ingrates have made the music on here completely incompatible with an iPod. I can't rip the music and the enclosed format is only in WMA format which isn't compatible with an Apple product. I am now refusing to ever buy another CD by BMG and will support it's artists by going to thier own websites and buying the digital version from them directly or find the music illegally on the internet and them tell all my friends about the band and then see them in concert, which will do them a lot more good than buying a CD that mainly serves to fatten the pockets of the record lable...

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So if you wanna rip this CD you need to diable a driver that this CD will maliciously install on your computer without your consent. The driver is called sbcpHid and you can find in in the Device Manager by turning on "show hidden devices" adn "device by connection" in the "View" menu. Double click SbcpHid, click on the Driver tab, press the button labled "Stop" and click the drop down list and select "disabled". Reboot and then you should be able to rip the cd with anything software you like (I highly recomend Exact Audio Copy).

I can't even comment on the music on this CD--I'm sure that if it had been on a normally functioning CD, I would have loved it. But my experience has been brusquely hijacked by Sony's stunningly crude "copy protection" scheme, which insists that you "enjoy" the CD in an inescapably fullscreen (or absolutely invisible) application with--apart from a cheezy Windows Media plugin--two controls: "minimize" and "close".

I don't copy CDs. I don't rip them. I don't have an MP3 player. All I like to do is listen to the music I paid for, as a conscientious customer, at work, while I work. WinAmp's "windowshade" mode is perfect for this, allowing me to change tracks, adjust volume, etc., with minimal interruption of my flow, and its intelligent design is in stark contrast to the Neanderthal user interface Sony-BMG has seen fit to inconvenience us with. I refuse to believe that the mercenaries who designed and marketed this atrocity actually use it to listen to their own personal music collection. Foisting it on us is therefore a glaring crime of business ethics, and I feel like a chump for not having read the ultra-fine print on the back. But it won't happen again, I learned my lesson. But you don't have to learn the hard way: do NOT purchase this experiment in consumer debasement.

When an industry begins to see its paying customers as adversaries, we are surely witnessing its demise.