Make-your-own CD sites

[chronictown]

This might have been discussed elsewhere, but nothing's come up on my searches....can anyone recommend a good site/manufacturer for putting a CD together? My band is finishing up the mixing process for our initial EP, and I've got some nice album artwork all ready to go...just need to put it all together in one package. I've looked around on-line and there seems to be plenty of sites devoted to make-your-own CDs, so I'm just seeing if I can narrow down the search based on other peoples' experiences. Thanks for any help sent this way!
Cheers,
Chris

[teb]

We did a three of ours through "Groove House" and they did a nice job at what seemed like a reasonable price. I uploaded bitmaps for the graphics, built to fit their templates for the art and one of our guys who has a studio uploaded the audio. Quick service and no problems. Some of the graphic files I uploaded didn't have much margin for error if the finished product was going to look like I wanted it to look and they did a great job on them. Our Groove House covers all look better than the Warner/Wounded Bird Records reissue of our old Elektra album does - and it was done by pros.

Concept file for the disk on one of ours and the finished CD in its box.

[jimk]

We're using Discmakers
JimK

[jps]

Chris, try these guys, I bet they can make you cheap CDs!

[chronictown]

Thanks for the info, guys. Todd - that is some very cool and clever CD artwork/packaging! I think ours will be comparatively modest for now, just a freebie to hand out at shows. Our first real album will probably be a different story, though, especially if we get a major label deal

Jeff - hilarious! I'll PM Bad Ronbo and see if they're willing to sign us on

[manta]

Discmakers has a 100 CDs in thin cases and single insert deal. Great for giveaways.

Best,

Timbo

[fireglo67]

We did a three of ours through "Groove House" and they did a nice job at what seemed like a reasonable price. I uploaded bitmaps for the graphics, built to fit their templates for the art and one of our guys who has a studio uploaded the audio. Quick service and no problems. Some of the graphic files I uploaded didn't have much margin for error if the finished product was going to look like I wanted it to look and they did a great job on them. Our Groove House covers all look better than the Warner/Wounded Bird Records reissue of our old Elektra album does - and it was done by pros.

Concept file for the disk on one of ours and the finished CD in its box.

What a superb concept!
Marvellous.
I may have to 'borrow' that idea at some point!

[teb]

I was amazed when we started thinking about doing CDs at how totally unispiring and boring the graphics on so many of them that I owned were, especially on the disks themselves. I was a sculpture major in college, and my dad is a watercolor painter, so give me a blank space and I'm probably going to fill it up with something - especially if the cost is within pennies of a plain white or silver disk with a little bit of text on it. This was to be a CD of old recordings from the early '70s that we found on reels of master tapes in a box in somebody's basement, so that was our "theme" for this one. While our audio guy was digitizing them in his studio I told him to shoot me a couple good photos of a couple of the reels. He hung them on a fence post in his backyard, took a couple shots and e-mailed me the photos. He also sent a scan of an original song list that was stuck in the box with one of the tapes. I took the list, carefully deleted the song titles (which weren't all the correct ones or in the proper order for the CD) leaving the lines and header, printed it, and then had a blank list to work with. I hand wrote the new titles into the blanks, trying to keep that somewhat messy, realistic look, stuck couple pieces of masking tape on it, trimmed it to shape and scanned it. Then I overlayed the new list scan on top of the reel photo using Photoshop, but only about 90% opaque, so that the dark areas of the reel would just slightly show through the "paper" as they do in real life. The "do not erase" label was borrowed from another reel's photo and I made the Ship label in Photoshop using graphics that we used back in the old days for concert posters. It's kind of fun to do a simple project like this, with its only intention being to surprise the viewer when they open the box and make them think "Wow, that's pretty cool!"

Here is the original reel photo, the original list and the modified final list before it was installed over the reel.