Here's a fun one...

Originally posted here, 01/31/06

My little brother had been complaining that when he converted MP3s to CD-Audio to play in the car, they kept skipping. I figured Nero 7 (my burning suite of choice) was just being funny, so I told him I'd have a look at it the next chance I got.

Anyway, this past Saturday, one Roz Doctorow comes to see me at work, asking for a rush order on her son Neil's laptop. It had been dropped and was not booting into Windows. While we don't officially do rush orders and I am now working my section alone on Saturdays, I decided I'd see what I could do for her. Turns out the hard drive was bad and I was able to replace it and re-install Windows (and hold down the fort) before 4:00pm. I told her I'd recognized her last name... I'm pretty sure I had just worked on one of her computers before. She suggested that perhaps I had recognized it because of her other son, Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing fame. No dice; I'd never really read the site before, though I had heard of it.

Earlier today, while I was looking into my little brother's MP3-burning issue, I decided to look up this Cory Doctorow kid and see what he was all about... Just curious, I guess. Well, turns out he's recently been threatened with a lawsuit because of a recent post he'd made on Boing Boing. The offending post got me thinking: I have at least two games on my main machine here that use the copy protection software mentioned in his article, so I did some checking, and sure enough, I was getting reproducible CD device error reports in Windows' System Event Log. This could be the source of my MP3 problem.

I got a developer-provided removal utility for the problematic software and let it do it's thing. While the errors have completely disappeared, I can no longer play Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory or TrackMania Sunrise Extreme (two very fun games).

In the end, the real culprit of the skipping MP3s was the latest MP3PRO plug-in (2.0.5.1) that Nero 7.0.1.4 shipped with, and I fixed it by grabbing version 2.0.4.0 from Nero 6.6.0.16; the copy protection software was merely slowing things down. Strange how these things come about though... Synchronicity strikes again.