Preparing Your New CD For Release
The best way to ensure a stress-free manufacturing process and flawless finished product is to make sure all the elements of your project are in perfect shape when they arrive at our plant. The extra care and time you take in preparing your materials before production will be rewarded with meeting deadlines and lots of happy fans and bandmates. Here are some things to keep in mind when preparing your order.
1. Your audio master
Make sure your audio master (the disc you’re sending us of your finished recording — or the file you are uploading) sounds and functions exactly the way you want it to. The finished discs you get back from us will be an exact match of the master you send them (unless you’re ordering post-production mastering), so it’s important that your master sounds exactly the way you want it to, with all of the tracks in the correct order and the right amount of spacing between songs. Always make a safety copy of your master before you ship or deliver it anywhere!
You don’t need to send a master disc if you opt to upload your audio files online. For audio CD orders, we accept replication-ready DDP files, but they also can accept and prepare individual audio files such as WAV and AIF for replication.
If you need professional mastering, the engineers at SoundLAB can give your music the soaring highs and booming lows you need to compete with the other releases out there.
2. Your design files
If you are providing completed graphics in a Disc Makers CD template, there is a lot you can do to ensure your finished product looks great and your project moves along as smoothly as possible. Make sure that you leave the size of the template page as is. Simply place your art into the print area following the bleed, trim, and safety guides
as shown. Don’t copy the template elements into a new page of your own, crop the page, or move any of the template elements around. The page size and white space Details you need to know to get your project done right and done on time. When preparing your disc design, simply place your art into the square as shown, don’t mask the art into a circle or punch out the center hole – we take care of that during production.
