I have been playing music CDs on my computer for many years without issue until recently when I purchased a CD with ‘Copy Control Technology’. When this CD is inserted into the computer, a different player than usual appears and proceeds to play the music CD. Now, I am unable to play any normal (non-copy control protected) music CDs on the computer. When I insert one of these CDs, the normal player appears and the time counter runs, but no sound is heard. The sound does work for other applications, so it appears to be a problem with the CD player as opposed to a system-wide problem with the computer sound. Attempts to seek help from the CD publisher have been unsuccessful. The computer is running Windows 98.

What you have encountered is called Digital Rights Management (DRM). Some CD publishers/labels have introduced copy protection onto their CDs, to prevent the unauthorised duplication or ripping of these CDs. In a nutshell, the CD content is encrypted or in a proprietary format, and can only be played within its own player included on the CD. This prevents the CDs being used with other players, which may have the facility to rip or copy music from the CD.

With such systems there can always be side-effects. In recent times, there has been significant controversy over some DRM systems used on CDs which install items on the user’s computer. I am not saying the DRM used on your CD is like this, but this demonstrates the problems which can be caused by such copy protection mechanisms.

The problem you have encountered seems to be more overt, since you have lost sound when playing normal CDs through the normal CD player application. Unfortunately, such issues can be quite difficult to fix. Firstly, check whether the DRM protected CD has installed any software on your computer, such as the in-built CD player, which could be conflicting with other CD player applications on the computer. You can check for any such installed applications through the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ control panel. I am unsure under what name the player would be listed, but it should hopefully be obvious enough to recognise.

Should the problem not be solved, it may be possible the player has been installed on the computer, but is not present in the list of installed programs, and is silently running in the background and inadvertently preventing normal CDs from being played. We can try closing background Windows processes one-by-one to check whether the problem stops. Make sure you are disconnected from the internet and any other networks when attempting this procedure, as any running antivirus and/or firewall software may be closed. Should you wish to proceed, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to open the Task Manager. Looking at the list of processes, close all non-essential tasks. Normally, you should be able to close all tasks except ‘explorer’ and ’systray’ (although this differs between computers). Once this is done, check whether you can play normal CDs. If so, one of the background processes was interfering with the normal CD player. In this case, restart the computer (which will restart all the processes) then close the processes one-by-one, checking each time whether the problem has been fixed. Once the problem stops, the most recently closed process is the culprit. We can prevent this process from loading on startup by going to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘msconfig’ (without the quotes) then click OK. Click the Startup tab and untick the entry for that process to prevent it loading on startup. Be aware: you may be unable to play your DRM protected CD unless that process is running.

All else failing, try to reinstall the sound drivers for your sound card. Make sure you have the drivers handy or have downloaded the latest drivers from the manufacturer’s website. Go to ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘System’ control panel. Click the ‘Device Manager’ tab. Expand ‘Sound, video and game controllers’ and right-click your audio devices, then select ‘Remove’. Click OK to confirm you would like to remove the device. Once this is completed, restart the computer and the audio card should be redetected and you can reinstall the drivers.