Right… a little while ago we got the Innocent Cabbage CD pressed, and the Sacre Bleu! CD is at the pressers at the moment. If you’ve never had a CD pressed before you’re probably wondering what happens when a CD is pressed.

There are two different kinds of ‘pressing’ for CDs, duplication and replication.

• Duplication
  This is basically glorified burning. It’s good for short runs (under 500) and generally has fast turnaround. Unfortunately sometimes this means the discs wont play in some CD players.
• Replication
  This is also known as ’stamping’, and this is what most CDs you see in stores are like. They make a glass master of your disc and stamp the data into molten plastic. It actually ends up cheaper for larger runs (1000+) and will genreally work with all CD players. The point at which most folks will go from duplication to replication is the 500 CD mark (at which point prices are about the same).

Costs?

I don’t know what it’s like in other countries, but generally a 500 CD run will cost anywhere from $1,000-$1,400 AUD. We’ve done 500 runs for all our CDs so far, simply ’cause it’s the smallest amount you can get for replcation and it’s a nice round number.
Having more pages to the insert, clear backing trays, white on the disc itself and so on will increase the cost, though getting more pages to inserts isn’t hugely expensive, so go crazy with that, it’s a good way to add a bit more coolness to a release.

Artwork?

The artwork for a CD will probably be obsessed over just about as much as the audio - and rightly so, nothing worse than having a few hundred CDs with typos and shitty colours!
As with all imagery used for print the pressing place will likely want all the artwork in .eps or .tif format, at 300 dpi, in CMYK. CMYK means ‘Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black’, and is the colours used in print. What you see on your computer screen is ‘RGB’ (red / green / blue) and is actually a different set of colours from what can be printed onto stuff. Generally, when viewing on a computer screen you’ll find RGB to be a lot more vibrant and alive than CMYK, which can seem a little ‘dull’, so when you’re doing your artwork it’s probably a good idea to start designing in CMYK not RGB.
Most printers will want a 3mm bleed around all the artwork, and may have stipulations about sizes / safe print margins and so on - best to talk to your presser about all of this.

Audio

You simply provide the presser with a ‘master’ copy, so you just burn an audio CD (at low burn speed!) and make sure it’s exactly how you want it, they’ll make all the copies from your master. Treat it with superdooperspecial care getting it to the pressers, any scratches/jumps in your master will likely come through in every copy made from it.

Alternatives?

So you’re a poor bastard and you don’t have a spare grand lying around to get CD pressed ‘pro’ huh? Well first off - no, quit whining, you’re not poor. $1,000 actually isn’t that huge an amount of money, if every member of a 4 peice band throws in $150 bucks, the label manager pitches in a couple of hundred and you beg/borrow/steal another hundred from friends/family you’ll have enough. Perhaps arrange your band’s money in a ‘fund’ (which for Innocent Cabbage involves a small jar full of coins and small notes) where you put all the money made from gigs. Really. One grand sounds big but take less drugs and buy less beer at the pub for a few months and don’t fritter away your money, you’ll have enough.

Shut up I really am poor!

If you aren’t organised enough to get money together for a pressing then your other option is to do it yourself (you lazy bastard). You can buy labels that will go on top of CDs quite cheap at places like Officeworks or your local computer store and use your parents / schools / friends printer to print on them if you’re a bit dodgy and feel like not paying for ink. You don’t need a ’stamper’ label applicator, just make sure you get the kind of labels that have a small hole the size of the centre hole in the CD, and use the spindle (holder thing) from one of those 25 packs of blank CDs to align the label with the CD.

You can then print out a nice copy of your cover artwork on a good printer and go photocopy a bunch at some place that does colour photocopying. It can be mega cheap, just get your artwork the right size and preferably use a simplish design as even good photocopying will look a wee bit dodgy.
Sit for hours on end cutting out the cover art and folding it and sticking it into trays until you can’t stand it anymore and voila, a CD.

On a final note, for the last two Pith releases we’ve been using a local mob called ‘Starfire Multimedia’. They’re reasonably cheap, and whilst we could probably save a hundred bucks or so per 500 run by going elsewhere they’re really nice people, reliable and almost always available to contact. If you’re in Melbourne Australia I’d recommend em: www.starfiremultimedia.com.au

This entry was posted by Will Dayble on Sunday, June 5th, 2005 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Start an Independent Record Label. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.