The answers to everything duplication blog

Many companies are using USB drives duplication not only as a marketing tool, but a distribution vehicle for latest company news and products. USB drives are flexible in terms of storage capacity, it ranges from 256mb to  as much as 16 gb. Data can be pre-loaded and locked as un-erasable if desired; partitions can be set up to keep locked content separated from available space. It can be programmed to bring up a specific ad or presentation before your target audience can access the drive The possibilities are endless, it can stream videos, display presentation, archive documents and more.

Now you can be green whether you make 10 copies or 1,000 CD duplication! Introducing a new eco-friendly sleeve to package CDs and DVDs, featuring 100% post consumer waste, this sleeve is recyclable, and best of all, there is no minimum purchase.

The sleeve can either be used as is or a sticker can be placed on top to dress it up.

Quality control is an important step of CD duplication, CD replication, DVD duplication and DVD replication process. When we first receive a customer’s master, it is checked for playability on a DVD player, computer and stereo. We look for errors in menu navigation, skipping, freezes in video, extreme audio levels. The disc is inspected for physical damage such as scratches and dust. Customers are notified of any potential problems before we start actual production. The duplicated or replicated discs are randomly checked under the same guidelines to ensure consistent quality.

In large run replication, specialized machines are used to verify data on the discs by comparing the 1’s and 0’s of the discs, to ensure the highest level of quality among the thousands of discs that are being produced.

With double layer blank DVDs (abbreviated as DL DVDR here) it allows longer videos to be placed on a single DVD. Is it possible to duplicate a DL DVDR like a regular single layer DVD? While DL DVDR has been around for a little while, there are not many choices in the brand of media, and some media tend to have compatibility issues in older players. We would suggest against making mass duplication of a DL DVDR master; instead opt to compress the entire disc to a single layer DVD for DVD duplication, or split the content onto a 2-disc set.

CD audio files come in many formats today, there is the most common mp3, mp4, and also the AIFF and WAV. Which one is the best format for CD duplication and CD replication? Let’s start with talking about the different file formats that can be used to create an audio CD:
MP3 and MP4 are compressed formats that are most popular with online downloads, however not the best choice and quality for duplication and replication.

AIFF is commonly used on Macs and is an uncompressed audio file format that provides excellent sound quality.

WAV is a comparable format that is mostly used on PCs, still an uncompressed audio file format and tends to be large in size.

Therefore, making an audio CD master from AIFF and WAV will preserve the best sound quality. When making a CD master we should always burn as an audio CD, not data CD. Most CD burning softwares today will convert the mp3, AIFF or WAV into an audio CD format when it is set up as an ‘audio’ CD. An ‘audio’ CD will play in any home, car stereo and computer, while a ‘data’ CD containing MP3, AIFF or WAV files will only play in computers and stereos that are equipped to play audio files.

Silver knockout is the silver part that shows through the artwork of the disc, as the example here. When designing artwork for the silver knockout, simply use white and indicate on your artwork the white areas will actually be silver.

When the discs are printed we will then skip the normal white base and print the art directly on the silver disc. Take note that any CMYK printing on silver will have a slight metallic look. It can be avoided if a special white mask is created just for the areas that do require a white base. To do so create a separate white layer and indicate it as a special white mask. Extra film charges might apply.

The safest way to send CD audio or CD-Rom content electronically is saving it as a disc image. A disc image is a copy of a CD all wrapped in one file. Instead of sending the individual songs or tracks all you’ll be sending is one file. Once the image file is created, it is best to zip it using Winzip or Stuffit before it is transferred electronically to a FTP.

Here’s the step by step on how to do that in Toast (the version we have in this example is Toast 7)

1. First burn a CD and verify the contents are correct.

2. If all is correct insert the CD into the CD-Rom, open Toast

3. Click on Copy tab, Click on File menu and select Save as Disc Image

4. For audio CDs the file extension will be .sd2f, data content CD file extension will be .toast

5. Zip the file using Stuffit or other utility tools for upload

This might be a bit confusing, the song and artist names that show up on iTunes, are they the same as the ones that show up on car stereo and certain CD players? There are 2 different methodologies here: CD-Text and ID3 Tag. CD-Text is hardware based with track information embedded on the physical CD. ID3 Tag is metadata that stores song, artist, album, genre, year, composer and other info about a particular song.

iTunes and other software audio player reads ID3 Tags from database such as Gracenote to retrieve song information, while certain car stereo, home stereo and DVD players can read CD-Text.

Both types of codes can exist on the same CD, to add CD-Text you need to have a CD writer and burning software that are capable of writing CD-Text. To edit ID3 Tags check out this iTunes Gracenote guide.

MPEG/MPG: a video file format offering excellent quality in a relatively small file, a family of standards used for coding audiovisual information for the internet, DVD and other storage media. It is the compression standard for SD (standard definition) DVD.
MOV: MOV is a file extension used by the QuickTime-wrapped files, can be created by a variety of video editing software. MOV is a container format and can contain video, animation, graphics, 3D and virtual reality (VR) content or text. It can be used for internet video, or as uncompressed format in editing.

VOB: a container format in DVD-media. It contains actual video, audio, subtitle, menu contents of a DVD. It is created usually by the authoring program.

AVI: a multimedia format introduced by Microsoft. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback. It is usually found on internet video

WMV: is a compressed video format introduced by Microsoft. Originally it was mostly used for internet streaming. Its latest codec is one of the 3 video codecs in Blu-Ray discs.