X-Cop Fly Company

I’m an eBay addict, and if you are too, you know it’s very easy to buy used and cheap CDs. You can even get rare and out-of-print CDs, some obscure ones go for over $100!

However, often times people take advantage of the rarity of some CDs to sell unsuspecting (or, sometimes, desperate) people bootlegs. Often they are marketed as “(insert country here) Import” to increase the perceived rarity.

There is this one seller who operates under various names, usually Retrospect Records, but also Vegas CDs, Rock-it Records, or Adrian (sometimes Sam) McCaslin. He gets consistently high ratings on eBay, yet a Google search will prove his “metal/AOR reissue label” status illegitimate. Negative feedback exposing McCaslin results in negative feedback for you, with a rude tone, and a block from his future auctions. Check this thread at another label’s forum to see VegasCDs, a supposed lawyer with supposed knowledge of Russian export laws, in action – it’s really funny until he admits his faults.

Without doing appropriate research, I bought an “Italian import” of Lionheart, a 1984 out-of-print Iron Maiden side-project-of-sorts. I thought his username, which is repeatedly changed and at the time was something like “vegascds”, referred to a record store or eBay vendor based in Vegas. Instead, I got this:

(Click the thumbnails to see the full picture. Sorry for the blurriness, as I wasn’t concerned with staying still)

Seems fine…

This seems strange, “2005 Rock-It” without a copyright notice, and a phony UPC code which apparently belongs to “Perfection in Pain” by death metal band Corporation 187.

But the most obvious indicator:

Ummm…. yeah.

The audio on this CD was pretty low in quality, more evidence of a bootleg.

Fortunately we have ImgBurn, a “for advanced users only” software program (freeware) designed for burning ISO files to CD or DVD.

Here is a partial screenshot of the program:

Before we continue, it is important to note that there is a difference between CD-Rs and “real” CDs. Audio CDs and CD-ROMs are pressed in a factory, not in a CD/DVD-RW drive.

Click on the button entitled “Discovery”:

Make sure your CD is in the drive listed in the drop-down list highlighted in this picture, and note what comes after “Current Profile:”. I have circled the proof that this CD is a CD-R bootleg:

Proof this “rare Italian import” is a fake.

Now we will start with a real CD, purchased from a physical store sometime between 10-15 years ago. It’s the Foo Fighters’ self-titled album from 1995:

Now see what shows up in ImgBurn after I take out the Lionheart CD-R bootleg and replace it with the Foo Fighters CD:

I hope this has been informative. I think I’m gonna start doing similar instructional posts under a tag called “tutorial”.

The Tutorial: Check if the CD You Won off eBay is a Bootleg Using ImgBurn by X-Cop Fly Company, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at xcopfly.com.