CD-R SCMS burning/copying question

A friend of mine sent me a CD-R of a CD he copied on a Pioneer home stereo CD recorder.

I was told that any CD-Rs recorded on a CD recorder are encoded through the SCMS technology on the machine, preventing you from copying CD-Rs off of other CD-Rs.

Will I still be able to copy this CD-R on to another CD-R using a CD burner on a computer using Nero or Roxio?

Or will the SCMS encoding on the CD-R that I am copying from, prevent that from happening?

Any help would be most appreciated. Thank you.

 

You will be able to copy that. SCMS is not an encoding scheme.

 

If it's not, then what is it exactly?

 

All it does is prevent a digital copy of a copy. There is an informational bit called the copy bit that can be set on the data transmitted via an SP/DIF connection. When a receiving device sees this bit, it is supposed not to record that data. However, the data is transmitted as usual. The question is, whether the receiving device honors that bit. All SCMS does is govern the use of this bit.

The music industry killed DAT with SCMS. They required that consumer DAT recorders had SCMS. SCMS caused so much confusion, that people thought they couldn´t make a digital copy of their CDs with DAT. In fact, all that SCMS did was prevent making a copy of a copy of a CD in the digital domain.

 

So whether a CD-R is recorded with a device that uses SCMS or not, it doesn't matter when you burn a copy of it with a computer.

It makes no difference at all, right?

 

No. If using Nero or EAC, or hell anything you please, you're fine.

 

One warning: About three years ago, HP produced some "music only" computer burners. They didn't sell and didn't last long on the market. As long as you don't have one of these units you are good to go.