blog for week 4 in the semester numbering 2: CD city

Here it is folks, the ins and outs of CD manufacture (surprisingly hard to find pictures of on the net). You take one master CD that meets the industry standards to the factory where a pair of technicians will spend 8 hours putting information on a 'stamper'. (The stamper is a reverse mold of the original information which is made from metal covered by glass). Then there are the CD production lines. The biggest issue with CD manufacture is getting your job into their schedule. In a large factory, a disc can be printed every three seconds. The process is approximately as follows...plastic pellets are melted down, stamped as they reach melting point, coated in metal and coated in more plastic. Finally, the disc needs a government approved barcode, I'm not sure if this is every individual disc with its own code or if the code is relevant to the information printed on it. If you want to be stingy, you can attempt to burn uber numbers of CDs at home...I don't recommend it. However, if you insist on this course of action, there is a program called Bravo that will slowly burn your discs for you (like maybe over night). Finally, your disc needs a picture, you have a choice between offset printing (photographic quality) or silk screen printing (more dotty). You could get a CD in the shape of a business card. Pretty expensive and they can only be played in CD players with trays but how cool is that!!! You can get CDs in other custom shapes too, they need only to be balanced. The plastic for these needs to be of a high quality. So, when you get all your CDs back, keep your master copy in a safe place. Oh, and of course, use refutable manufacturing plants who will take good care of your master while it is in their hands. David Grice suggests having three copies of the master, one for listening, one for safe “tape it up, never listen to it” and....another one for safe. Not surprisingly enough, people still manufacture tapes (you can sell anything to people crossing the Nullabor) and vinyl (it retains a much warmer sound). In Australia, there is only one place that produces vinyl, it is in Melbourne I think. Now, a little more class project feedback: ME – Instrumentally sound (good drums oh yeah) the vocals are out of tune, is this necessarily a negative (NB, the band went and recorded a bunch of stuff with someone else and put it on their Myspace and kept all of the ear drum mutilating partials int eh guitar and bass sounds, they obviously like to sound bad and, as a professional, I needed to give the band what they want. Ponytails gets thumbs up for panning of guitars and vocals, vocals maybe a bit loud. Simon – Mixed in headphones equals boom double tracked guitars good vocals in mono would be a different creature voice double tracked Jake – Rockin could have used a Rhythm part Don't work with pissed people Daniel – open lid for piano recording middle string miced with u87 good honky tonk feel