Its worth remebering there are a wide variety of diffrent copy protection systems. I use Soundforge 6 to rip CDs so I can listen to them on my PC. Soundforge 6 isnt really a bog standard ripper its a audio editing programme but it does a temendous job at getting by the copy protected CDs that I have bought so far.

The one on The Darkenss album is a little bitch. Apparently its not on the UK version of the album. But on the CD i have it is. Media Player just totally refuses to play it, and it crashes the program. Any program I have used to rip it to MP3, works, but I get horrible crackling, popping and squeaking on the MP3s. Still havent found a soloution that works yet for this.

I must be lucky, non of my cd's have failed to work, but one is tempremental (Radio City 96.7 Summer In The City (the blue one) cd2) only plays to track 7 on the pc (track 4 on Linux )

All else fails, line out, to line in and record (provided your player plays it that is - my parents 1987 sanyo wont, but their 1997 goodmans will)

Just in terms of getting as far as playing CDs on PCs, I seem to remember having problems with playing some CDs using the free-with-windows-98 player which a move to (highly recommended) QCD sorted, so definitely try different players (plus use the shift/no autorun trick). And of couse, watch out for winamp-style players which can't handle the old-fashioned concept of an album and bung gaps between tracks. So far I've been lucky, managed to listen to everything I want to on my PC, but I fear the number of non-CD CDs will grow. The record companies do need to sort this out (and answering the "are you buying a piece of plastic or the right to listen to a piece of music?" question would be nice as well). First rule of piracy prevention is to make the legitimate product more attractive than the copy (and CD wins over MP3 for me). It's no good expecting people to be happy listening to the CDs they own on only some of their CD players.