The Phantom <phantom@u.washington.edu> writes:
Lastly and perhaps most interesting: I suggested that by using one of these garage bands, we might be able to distribute our own messages on CD. By getting ahold of a local bands' master before they take it to get a record pressed, we could digitize it ourselves, encode our messages (the kama sutra, a message of goodwill, the songs' lyrics, whatever the band wants, too!) into the LSBs and then give it back to the band to press CDs (put the key on the front cover if you like).
[...]
I would be willing to shell over $15 for a (basically) small-capacity encrypted CD ROM disk, even though I personally don't have a player.
A nice idea, but functionally impossible with today's technology. The firmware of CD-Rom players does not allow them to read the digital data of an audio CD and output it in digital, the output must be analog. The only exception to this that I know of is the SGI CD-rom. This restriction against digital output from audio CDs was put in after the music publishing industry made a big issue over pirating music, etc... I am not sure what mods have been done to the firmware of the SGI CD rom players, but the people on alt.cd-rom say it can read the digital data from audio-cds. Without this capacity you are not going to be able to stick the message in the CD as easily as you would be able to with a cd-rom player that could read digital... jim