Burning with gadget lust

I really want to get the bonus CD, About Bleeding Time, done in time for Baycon. Which is in, um, ((\me riffles through calendar)) TWO WEEKS!. It's pretty nearly done.

The original plan was to get the label printed on blank disks by somebody that offers fast service, like DiscMakers, and burn them at home. This would give me the ability to provide custom burns, like audio-only or cd-extra. I might still do that.

But this gadget is awfully tempting. The only problem I can see is the requirement for XP Pro -- I'm damned if I can see why, since this one can use vanilla XP or even a G5 Mac. And why not an Intel Mac, which I actually have? Grumble. And then there's this one, with a built-in PC, and this one, which is dirt cheap (but doesn't print).

The question is, would I use it enough to justify the cost? I am not going to use CD-R disks for the studio albums, like CC&S. I wouldn't do that to my customers. But for bonus disks, instant concert disks, short runs for friends, ... I'm pretty sure anything but the cheapest one wouldn't be worth it.

Advice?

The pico with off-site printing is looking really tempting. Somebody stop me...

Sweet!

DIY 3D printer utilizes hot air, sugar to craft random objects - Engadget

Just when you thought a $5,000 3D printer wasn't such a bad deal after all, the zany gurus at the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have put Desktop Factory's iteration to shame. The CandyFab 4000 is a homegrown printer that utilized a bevy of miscellaneous spare parts around the lab as well as the same sort of CNC hot-air control mechanism that we previously saw in the text writing toaster contraption. Their selective hot air sintering and melting (SHASAM) method allows the printer to begin with a bed of granular media (sugar, in this case) in which a directed, low-velocity beam of hit air can be used to fuse together certain areas repeatedly, eventually working the remaining grains into a three-dimensional object. The creators claim that while their CandyFab machine only ran them $500 in addition to junk parts and manual labor, even starting from scratch shouldn't demand more than a grand or so, so be sure to click on through for a few snaps of the fascinating results and hit the read link for the full-blown skinny.

(Original article at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.)

Questions for CD Duplicators

Note: I'm terrible with phone calls. I put them off for weeks, sometimes. If I don't have everything written out ahead of time, I don't remember what to ask, and leave out important stuff.

( So that's what I'm doing. This is almost entirely for my own reference; I doubt that anyone else will be interested. But I'm thinking about it now and it's after business hours on the East coast. )

Note: I'm calling discmakers, shortstacks, and Oasis; I'm mainly interested right now in printed blank disks and short-run CDROMs with added audio tracks. Any other recommendations?

Tracks

Fixed some problems on About Bleeding Time; levels on "Rambling Silver Rose", applied some EQ and took out a couple of vocal fumbles on "Ta(l)king Preorders", and applied EQ and 3dB of noise reduction to "House Carpenter/Demon Lover" -- which really improved noticably. There was a lot of high-frequency ringing that the EQ killed. In all cases the EQ was Audacity's built-in "acoustic" curve, which has a bass-to-midrange boost and low- and high-frequency rolloffs.

Did some work this morning on the CD-ROM portion: a couple of LGPL license notices, and (finally) moved the Makefile templates down into the Software directory so people can see them. There's over 200MB of CD-ROM, which means that players that don't automatically skip data tracks will have about 20 minutes of silence. I'll stick in a warning.

It's not professional quality, but it isn't meant to be: it's a quick-and-dirty bonus compilation pulled together from four different concerts.

Tomorrow I'll call the various duplicators. Still taking suggestions beyond DiskMakers (currently the favorite because of their Berkeley office), Oasis, and ShortStacks. I may very well switch loyalty for CC&S; what I'm looking for here is fast turn-around and maybe just printing on blank, recordable disks. On the flip side, ShortStacks is in the running for CC&S in part because they're happy with plain old image files for layout. Not as sharp on the text, perhaps, but easy to generate with the free software I already have.