Soon I am making a long drive from Utah --> Alabama, and for trips like these I like to have a good audio book to listen to. My choice this time is The Lord of the Rings Trilogy unabridged audiobook, but I am having the following problem, and after googling and other searches I am unable to figure this one out.

So I purchase the three-book CD set from Barnes & Noble and it arrives just fine (sealed/brand-new). I pop in the first disc into my PC to start ripping for my iPhone, but many tracks seem to be unreadable or corrupted. For example, the first track plays fine in iTunes or WMP (using either of my two optical drives), but then the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th tracks will be unreadable. The 5th will play, but then the 6, 7, and 8 tracks are unreadable/corrupted, and so on in that exact same pattern.

So, I called and got a replacement set sent to me, but the new set has the exact same problem. I then tried playing the discs in a PS2 and my car stereo, and they play perfectly!! That said, is there some sort of copy protection on these discs, to the point that I cannot even play them on the computer, even without trying to rip them? I am pretty sure that I've read people's posts online about how they ripped them (presumably with no problems), so obviously I am very frustrated with this. Even if the actual CDs work in my car's audio system, I still would not be happy with the fact that I have a gimped set of expensive CDs that I can't even rip into a compressed and more easily accessible format.

Did I really get two bad batches of brand-new audiobook CDs? Could my two optical drives be messed up even though they read DVDs, data and other discs just fine? I've even tried using EAC to rip them but the same issue is apparent (or it will read the first 3 seconds of the bad tracks and then suddenly stop). Even if I rip the functional tracks there are errors.

Help!

EDIT: Problem finally solved by using a friend's MacBook, as the discs play/rip just fine on that particular computer.

What exactly are you using as the audio converter? iTunes has always done this fine for me, but you may want to try getting a LAME (like Audicity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) ) and giving that a go.

Yeah I've tried iTunes, WMP, and EAC (Exact Audio Copy) using the LAME MP3 codec. The problem is that they won't even play the corrupt tracks, just skip them. It seems that it's simply a draconian form of copy protection.

Final update:

For some reason the discs played/ripped fine on a friend's MacBook, so either my two optical drives are borked for standard audio CDs or Macs don't read the corrupt protection data tracks the same way as Windows.