I bought the new Medeski Martin and Wood CD today, titled End of the World Party (just in case). I’ve heard some of the sample tracks on the web-site, and it rocks pretty hard. Very rich palette of keyboard sounds here, lots of “voice chorus” Mellotron, bass-heavy analog synthesizer sounds, and of course the usual Hammond and piano.

Rocking good tunes, I was looking forward to hearing them fully. But now I’m bitter, and shaking my fist at the world. Why? Because I can’t play the stupid thing. It’s copy-protected. My laptop would not even recognize that a disc was present.

It plays ok in my truck’s CD player, but that doesn’t cut it for me. I want to play it on my laptop, rip it into MP3s, and add it to my large collection of MP3s (every last one of them legally ripped from CDs I legally purchased, by the way.) But I can’t. The disc is useless to me. Back to the store it goes.

To their shame, HMV refused to take the disc back. They say it’s not defective. In a sense, they are right. In another sense, they are wrong. The disc was designed to be defective.

But it was not a complete waste. They did let me exchange it for another disc. I was in a hurry, so I couldn’t take a lot of time. I picked up The Best of Triumph the Insult-comic Dog DVD. Everybody on the Internet remembers Triumph from his hilarious riffing on a group of unsuspecting Star Wars geeks. I don’t have enough comedy in my DVD collection anyway.

Instead of paying solid cash for this defective piece of shit, I’ll just have to go find the tracks on BitTorrent or something. I tried to buy it legally, but I was unable to. So, great work there, guys. Are you happy now?

I’m sure somebody has been able to rip the album, or at the very least, redigitized it (with imperceptible loss of quality) from the analog output of a CD player. The analog hole has not been plugged yet. And never will be, I’ll wager.