Discmakers: The Review.
I just went through the process of releasing a CD with a band. My head is still spinning from all of the complexities we came across. It could have been much worse though, had it not been for a couple of key factors. For one, one of our members is a professor at state school up here and he teaches audio. That meant free studio time and free mixing and mastering. Not only was it a huge money saver, but the work was being done by someone we already trusted. Two, I did all the design work for it. This was another huge money saver, but also a time saver. Since design is what I do for a living, I was able to design everything quickly, know that everything was set up properly for prepress, and know that all the images used were free of copyright. Three, we used Discmakers.
None of us had ever had a CD professionally reproduced before (even the professor), so just based on a few vague recommendations from other bands we chose Discmakers. Everything was up in the air. We knew we wanted a lot of them, at least a few hundred. We knew we wanted the typical setup: a jewel case, a printed CD, a tray-card, shrink-wrapped with a barcode. Browsing around on their site a bit, we found a suitable package: 1000 CD’s in jewel-cases with an 8 page folding booklet for $1,590. We signed up for an account and we were on our way. As it turns out, they have design templates that all artwork needs to be submitted in. I downloaded those and placed our artwork in them. They were quite straightforward and helpful.
We were assigned a project manager when we signed up. Naturally, we had a bunch of questions so we called her up right away. Our biggest snag was turn-around. We were about two-weeks behind St. Patrick’s Day and we were really hoping to have a CD release
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