Whether it is making a copy of your latest demos to give to a friend, producing 20 CDs to send to record companies to try to get a deal, or transferring DAT tapes to CD for easier access and increased long term storage, there are plenty of good reasons to want to cut your own CDs.

History Lesson

Times have changed since CD-R was introduced more than ten years ago. The first system available to cut your own CD was manufactured by Yamaha. The system consisted of a central control unit and multiple CD recorders. The system cost was about $50,000 and had to be controlled from an external PC. To get digital audio onto the CD (it only recorded at 1x) you had to feed it from a Sony 1630 system which cost another $40,000. Oh, and don’t forget that the blank CD-Rs cost $85 each. You could not write part of the CD at one time and another part of the CD later, the whole CD had to be done at once.

Record producers would pay mastering facilities $350 per CD to be able to walk away with their finished album on a CD-R that they could listen to at home on their CD player. Some mastering rooms had multiple recorders in their Yamaha system so that they could make up to four CD-Rs at once. The bug had bitten us and we could never get enough CDs.

Soon Sonic Solutions hit the market and Sony started producing CD-R recorders and the price of blank CD-R discs started coming down---to $50 each.

Around 1994 Philips produced a stand alone audio CD-R recorder (under various brand names like Marantz, Studer, Carver, Micromega, etc.) that would allow you to transfer your digital audio from DAT tapes or record analog audio through the built in A/D converters. You could record one song and stop the CD-R recorder. You could add material as you needed in increments without “finalizing” the CD-R. When you were done adding tunes to your CD-R you could “finalize” the CD-R and it would become a CD that could no longer be recorded. It would now play back on any regular CD player.

The TOC

The key to this ability to add songs on to a partially recorded CD-R is the Table Of Contents or “TOC.” On a normal CD the first thing recorded is the Table Of Contents that tells the CD player where each cut starts, how long it is, and other information needed for the CD player to skip around between cuts. Without a TOC a CD player will display “NO DISC” when an un-finalized CD-R is inserted. CD-R recorders like the Philips used a temporary TOC area to compile information as the tunes were added to the disc. Once you were done adding things, the act of “finalizing” would gather this information and fill in the missing TOC. Once the TOC was written, nothing more could be added to the disc and CD players were happy to accept your CD.

The Future Is Bright

Now There are CD-R recorders coming out of our ears. You can buy them off the shelf at any computer store, and some new computers come with CD-R recorders instead of CD-ROM drives. Most recorders record at 2x or 4x and play back at 6x or even faster. Kodak makes a 6x recorder if you need the speed.

CD-R software now lets you drag and drop files to the blank CD-R disc. It looks just like a hard disk on your computer, except that you can’t erase it. If you drag audio files to a blank CD-R disc, you can produce and audio CD that will play on any CD player. With a 4x CD-R recorder you can record a 60 minute CD in 15 minutes. This makes it easier than ever to make CDs of your music for your friends.

The best part of this whole deal is the cost. You can buy a CD-R drive for your computer for under $300. Drives that record at 4x are under $500. Blank CD-Rs are available at all computer stores from $1 to $5 each depending on the brand name. I have even seen discs that were FREE after the mail-in rebate. You can’t beat that price.

Multiple Copies

If you want to make lots of copies of your CDs there are two ways to do it. You can pop in a fresh blank every 15 minutes until you have the 50 CDs you need, or you can get a CD duplicator. Advertisements for CD duplicators are showing up all over the place. Lower prices of drives have allowed for reasonable prices on multi-drive stand alone duplicators. I have a Microboards system that consists of one playback drive for the master CD and seven 4x recorders that can duplicate the source simultaneously. With this stack I can produce 28 discs per hour if the original is 60 minutes long. Even more if the original is shorter.

This type of duplicator performs bit by bit copies so that the copies are exact clones. It doesn’t matter if you are duplicating audio CDs to send to A&R departments, or CD-ROMs of your new catalogue to prospective customers, or pre-releases of your new software title for magazine reviewers.

Printing Labels

If you are going to look professional when you send out those CDs, you have to have nice looking labels. No more writing on the CD with a Sharpie and hand writing the blank label that comes with the blank CD-R.

There are two methods of adding professional looking labels to your newly duplicated CD. The first is Stick On Labels. There are many brands of pre-cut labels designed for placement on the back of the CD. These labels can be printed on any LASER printer or ink jet printer. You can buy tools from several manufacturers that help you center the label perfectly on the CD. The finished labels look good and are suitable for impressing your client with a professional image.

The second method is using a printer that prints directly on the back of the CD-R. Blank CD-R discs are available from many manufacturers with a “printable backing” in either a white of gold color. The backing has been designed to protect the sensitive data area of the CD-R while allowing you to use a thermal or ink jet printer to print whatever you want directly on the CD-R. Fargo makes a color ink jet CD printer. Rimage makes a monochrome (depending on the color of the ribbon) thermal CD printer.

Fully Automated

There are systems that you can set up that will automatically duplicate your CDs and print the labels without human intervention. Press the GO button when you leave at night and come back in the morning to find 200 finished CDs with labels printed on them.

With these automated systems, you buy the blank CD-Rs on a spindle. The autoloader picks up a blank CD-R from the ingoing spindle, places it in the recorder, closes the drawer and starts the recording process. After the CD is recorded, the autoloader picks up the CD and places it on the tray of the printer. The printer sucks the CD inside, prints the label and offers the prize back to the autoloader. The finished disc is placed in a stack on the outgoing spindle. Pretty slick.

Finally

With the prices of CD duplicators and blank CD-Rs dropping rapidly, it is now reasonable for an individual who needs a few copies of important CDs for distribution, to have his own duplication system. It doesn’t need to consist of seven recorders, it may only be one player and one recorder. Allowing the duplication to go on unattended with a stand alone device enables you to continue working on something else. You can be recording your next hit, editing the next CD, writing your next article, or whatever it is you need to be doing. Having a separate stand alone system does not tie up your computer while you are duplicating CDs.

If you are thinking about a small duplication system, just do it! For short runs it is now cheaper than sending a master to a CD plant for duplication. I hope that this time next year I will be talking about DVD duplicators and $1 blank DVD-R discs. I wont hold my breath, though.