RE: CD Production (a bit OT DTP...)

[goddard.duncan@mtvne.com]

Title: RE: CD Production (a bit OT DTP...)

my band ships a lot of cd stock overseas. we have found a guy who doesn't mind if we order 5 or 500- he does them as cd-r (never had one faulty) & keeps the master audio & artwork so all I have to do is call him or email him. he does dvd too.... cuts the art, folds & inserts.... we get these for about $2 each, irrespective of quantity or whether it's a new title.

I didn't have to shop around much for this deal, & he keeps it nicely personal but professional. I hope everyone gets as lucky when they need this kind of thing.

but anyway.

my main point is that for overseas sales, we can cut down on shipping costs by negotiating with the distributor for him to source & assemble the jewel cases locally. thus we only have to ship the discs & the artwork. most stores & mail-order sellers will have access to such things.

OR....
for most of our titles I have formatted the artwork to fit in a clear polythene sleeve (you may have seen these in boxes of 100 in radio shack or stationery/office supply/computer stores).

here's the DTP part:

the artwork is much simpler than you get with a jewel box, obviously, although you can get adventurous & print both sides of the paper (I generally don't, though).... it ends up looking like a mini LP sleeve.

I start with the front image, 200dpi & 123mm across by 125mm high. I position this at the top of the canvas which is 123mm by 250mm & then rotate it so I can do the rear image/text layout. I use corel photopaint, which lets me print external crop marks. my printer (a cheap colour laser) is pretty accurate for size, so the 123mm x 250mm is exactly right for these poly sleeves.

in any case, I only use my own printer for mock-ups & one-offs, like vinyl-restoration work.

for the discs- I scanned an ordinary cd I happened to have that was a solid block of colour, again at 200dpi, & used this to generate a mask for the on-body artwork. usually, though, this is just a couple of lines of text in a font (made from my handwriting ages ago using fontographer).

this makes the cd-r look home-made, even though it isn't.
actually this started as a wry comment on the snobbishness we occasionally encountered about our perfectly decent home-made cd-r's back in the days when we didn't sell enough stuff to justify farming it out.

hope some of this is useful-

duncan/r.m.i.

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