In late 2005, Sony BMG Music sparked the Sony CD copy protection scandal when it included a form of copy protection called Extended Copy Protection ("XCP") on discs from 52 artists. Upon inserting such a disc in the CD drive of a computer running Microsoft Windows, the XCP software would be installed. If CD ripper software (or other software, such as a real-time effects program, that reads digital audio from the disc in the same way as a CD ripper) were to subsequently access the music tracks on the CD, XCP would substitute white noise for the audio on the disc.