Known Bad CDs

Here is a list of all the bad CDs that we are aware of in the UK and elsewhere at the moment. Please use your browser’s Find In Page menu option to search, or use the artist or title index pages. Help us find more! See this page for details. Please post new reports to this address, and also let us know if you have any new information about any of the CDs listed below, or if you can confirm our reports. Thanks!

For people based in Germany, I recommend taking a look at c’t magazine’s online corrupt CD database. US residents might also want to look at Fat Chuck’s site for more information on US releases and the US situation.

Note that the effectiveness of these so-called “copy-protection” systems usually depends mostly on which particular CD-ROM drive make and model you have in your PC or Mac. Some people find that a corrupt disc will extract fine without problem the first time they try, and others will have trouble even playing it. The software used seems to matter less than the hardware, but several people have recommended ExactAudioCopy or CDEx which check more thoroughly for errors than some other apps.

‘Enhanced CDs’ (i.e. those with additional video/etc content) were previously uncorrupted, but this appears to no longer be the case. We have received a few reports of CDs with both corrupt audio data and enhanced content — so an ‘enhanced CD’ is no longer a 100% safe purchase, although these corrupt ones do seem rare.

IMPORTANT: Please, Windows users, make sure that you have AUTORUN turned OFF on your PC, or that you hold down Shift every time you insert a music disc from now on. There are a new generation of corrupt discs starting to appear that will try to install special drivers permanently onto your PC when you insert the disc, to stop you accessing the audio with your normal software players. See this article for all the details. These corrupt discs have reached almost everywhere now (Jun-2004), thanks to recent BMG releases.