Been meaning to answer this for a long time. Martin Schiff quoted something
David Tosti-Lane had posted in CompuServe's midiforum, which read, in part,
| If it sees a "0" here, then copyright is enabled, if it sees a "1",
| copyright is not enabled, and it stops looking. Again, I strongly suspect
| that consumer MD recorders by default set this bit to "0" on _all_
| recordings, regardless of their origin.
His suspicion was ill-founded. My Sony and Aiwa MD recorders, and my Pioneer
CD recorder, all being consumer machines, make SCMS-unlimited copies when fed
digital input from SCMS-unlimited sources.
As Petr Simanek originally posted here, the SCMS status of an MD segment can
be read on Sony decks (well, not the ATRAC 4.0 series) in Retry Cause Display
mode while the unit is playing it [or paused while playing it]. The status
byte breaks down as follows:
bit 7: 0 = premastered, 1 = recordable
bit 6: 0 = SCMS-restricted, 1 = SCMS-unrestricted
bit 5: 0 = SCMS-original, 1 = SCMS-copied
bit 4: always 0 on MiniDiscs
bit 3: always 0 on MiniDiscs
bit 2: always 1 on MiniDiscs
bit 1: 0 = monaural, 1 = stereophonic
bit 0: 0 = not preemphasized, 1 = preemphasized
So typically the high nybble will be 0 for premastered MDs, 8 for recordings
of analog input, A for recordings of digital input from types 0 or 8, and E
for SCMS-unlimited material. The low nybble will be 6 for stereo and 4 for
mono (add 1 if the segment is preemphasized).
Despite Mr. Tosti-Lane's expectations, digital transfers of type-E material
to consumer-grade recorders are type E.
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