Compact Disc Production

In this era of rampant digital distribution, I'm curious how many of you musicmakers still like to print and share your own CDs.

For my last couple of albums I made about 20-50 CD copies each, working with my girlfriend to print and format the album art on photo paper. We did this mostly for ourselves and our friends, people we could trade albums with. It's nice being able to hand somebody a polished physical copy of your work.

I get a lot of satisfaction from sharing these CDs, but I don't know if I could distribute them widely, it's been more a personal thing.

Anybody else like to make CDs DIY-style? And for those of you on [web]labels, have you had CDs made through them? If so, how have they turned out?

My real fantasy is to get a 3d printer and print stacks of fully customized CD cases. I'm thinking you could get really ridiculous with it.

I've actually been working on art for my first self-release, mostly for friends and myself, which'll be in physical and digital form. Burning the cds and making each disc's artwork and jacket by hand. The idea is actually quite exciting, even though it'll be a lot of work. I like the intimacy of a physical copy.

I do this every now and then, usually make around 100 copies and give them out or sell them for like $5.

It's good to find a solid press in the city, the one I use has really high quality printers and it costs about $1 a sheet (1 sheet fits 3 covers), so yeah, look out for those! I use a stamp on white CDrs, it's tough to find them, but when you find a small store that has them usually they'll always sell them and it's about $20 for 50 CDs.

Here is an image:

  On 6/11/2011 at 9:19 PM, Tamas said:

I do this every now and then, usually make around 100 copies and give them out or sell them for like $5.

 

It's good to find a solid press in the city, the one I use has really high quality printers and it costs about $1 a sheet (1 sheet fits 3 covers), so yeah, look out for those! I use a stamp on white CDrs, it's tough to find them, but when you find a small store that has them usually they'll always sell them and it's about $20 for 50 CDs.

 

Here is an image:

 

nice one! i really like the art.

i was lucky enough to find a bunch of supplies in my grandfather's old computer room, which allowed us to make the last couple batches essentially for free. but for future projects i might look into pro pressing.

Haven't tried it, but I thought it would be kind of neat to make every physical copy of an album unique - IE using different media to create the packaging each time, individually numbered, different album art based around a central theme, icon, or art style. The CDs would probably just be burnt on my computer (I've also tossed around the idea of using floppy disks as an electronic nerd answer to Indie rock bands using cassettes).

I'm planning on doing a 4/5 track release some time this year and then just selling it for about £1 around London. My main purpose is to actually get my name more out there though not to make any money.

  On 6/12/2011 at 12:33 PM, Cryptowen said:

(I've also tossed around the idea of using floppy disks as an electronic nerd answer to Indie rock bands using cassettes).

haha yes!! i've been thinking of doing this for a while now too. i made a few disks but i need to make art for them.

it's ridiculous trying to scale tracks down to 1.44mb! i've had to downsample considerably to get them to fit, even with my shortest songs.

RETRO-DIGITAL

I've given up on the idea of selling CDs for the time being. I don't like doing things by halves, and it's not worth the hassle of giving money to all the different societies and companies that demand a cut from each CD you professionally press up and sell, let alone renting out a warehouse to keep them in. While a few people want to buy tangible albums from me, the vast majority just want MP3 or FLAC files they can download immediately.

It's natural that people want to fulfill a childhood dream, so artists we like always wanted to release vinyl records because that was the predominant format when they were young, and similarly we want to release CDs because they were the predominant format when we were young. But it's much more practical to make products that people genuinely want to buy in large quantity, which these days means digital downloads.