Editing Serial Copy Management System (section)

==Circumvention==
Software and design defects in certain models of consumer Minidisc player allow SCMS to be defeated. Professional-grade Minidisc systems costing several thousand US dollars may have SCMS disabled as standard. Professional [[CD recorder]]s, including all computer drives, have SCMS disabled and can also record audio onto data CD-R discs.

European electronic hobby magazine ''[[Elektor]]'' published a construction project in the 1990s.  The device, once completed, was designed to be inserted in the digital link between SCMS enabled devices (the article was designed around the optical [[TOSLINK]] interface, but it would have been easy to adapt it to the [[S/PDIF]] coaxial link).  The circuit intercepted the SCMS control bits, and changed the "Cp" bit to the "not copyrighted" state.

Similar functionality is often also included in commercially available bitrate-converters, like the [[Behringer]] Ultramatch.

There is another way that SCMS can be defeated, but it requires copying the Table of Contents from a blank disc that already allows copying, to a recorded 'copy disallowed' disc.  The method is laborious, and suffers the disadvantage that the track marks and titles are lost in the process.

Minidiscs can be created from computer audio files using a freeware application called Web Minidisc Pro and this indeed offers far greater functionality than Sonicstage.<ref>[https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/webminidisc/start]</ref> This application features an option to change the SCMS bits in selected tracks to 'unprotected' allowing unlimited copies. The menu option even states an option to remove the SCMS completely, but the operation of this is unclear as the SCMS bits will always be present in the data format.