Has anyone checked out the new album Contraband, by Velvet Revolver? It opened at #1, beating out Usher and Avril Lange (sp?), which is a pretty big feat, imo.

Personally, I was underwhelmed at first, but with each listen, it's grown on me. The production is very grungy, so Slash's awesome guitar solos are a little obscured, but after a few listens, you can hear them a lot better.

Fall to Pieces, You Got No Right, and Loving the Alien are all instant classics in my book. Fall to Pieces might as well be Sweet Child O' Mine part 2.

Ah yeah... I was very pissed off with that. Some people can copy it just fine, some people can't. I was one of the ones who couldn't. Grip seems to do the trick, but it's really fucking lame.

I posted some messages in the VR forum and on a Gn'R forum expressing my displeasure, and recomended that Scott Weiland rant about that at his next concert, rather than journalist who call him a junkie that he is.

Yeah, of course you can. You're not supposed to be able to just stick the CD in and rip it with Media Player (though that seems to work for some people) or any other ripping software, and it's not supposed to copy with standard CD copying tools.

There's tons of ways around it, and ultimately, it's hurting only the people who bought it (like me), since the people who don't want to buy it are still downloading it.

I bought this CD today and was pleasantly surprised by how good it is, but it turns out I'm also one of the people who can't copy it to their computer. I hate BMG or RCA or whichever fascists are responsible for the copy protection. The Darkness's album originally had this problem too, but the record company got so many complaints and returns that they re-released it minus protection. We can only hope the same happens with Contraband, and indeed any other similarly protected records. Not that that'll help me much as I've already bought the bloody thing, but it would be nice if people who actually buy reecords weren't punished for the actions of those who don't.
Anyway, I'll probably listen to it a few more times and then it'll end up gathering dust on the shelf between The Best of Stan Ridgway and Vera Lynn does Techno...

Yeah, I held down shift the very first time I put it in the computer, hoping to bypass any shenanigans, but to no avail. ;)

You got a link for Grip? I've been looking around via Google, and found various references to the only protection on Contraband being the autorun program, and that it's a standard CD apart from that. Can't speak for the US version, but mine is certainly not a standard CD. My computer flatly refuses to even admit to there being any CD audio tracks on there. A prog called Easy CD-DA (which I just downloaded because it claimed to be able to rip all protected CDs), lists the tracks but that still refuses to play or copy them...

Turns out that the copy protection on my copy is the usual autorun-bypassable version, and that the audio tracks weren't being recognised because my DVD drive doesn't like the non-standard CD. Using the disc in my CD-RW drive works perfectly, and I now have perfect copies of all 14 tracks. This must be why some people have been able to rip it and some haven't... that's really crap. Still, happy now.