Macrovision's SafeAudio technology, designed to prevent PC-owning music fans from ripping CD tracks onto their hard drives, has been bypassed.

Commercial CDs protected by Macrovision's technology went on sale to the public in the US and elsewhere last month, part of a test programme to ensure listeners aren't upset by the company's system.

PC CD drives, on the other hand, require the mediation of a controller application, which treats all this extra noise as corrupt data and trigger a read failure. That, reckons Macrovision, renders SafeAudio discs unrippable. Every time you try to do so, you're told that the data has been damaged and the copy has been aborted.

The bypass, highlighted by European Web site CD Freaks, converts the disc tracks to .wav files in RAM and mounts them as readable volumes. At that point any .wav app can handle the rip. The bypass uses a custom VXD virtual device driver file. ®

*Macrovision claims that return rates on SafeAudio-encoded CDs are no higher than unprotected discs, but we're still not too happy about a technology that explicitly messes with a recording's fidelity. Doubly so, since it appears record companies don't seem too keen on actually telling consumers they're buying a SafeAudio CD.