This little piece of paper is the most misunderstood template in CD printing. To be honest even CD printers call it by different names, the two most popular being “CD Inlay” and “tray card”. It wouldn’t surprise me if you are thinking “what is a [...]]]>  

This little piece of paper is the most misunderstood template in CD printing. To be honest even CD printers call it by different names, the two most popular being “CD Inlay” and “tray card”. It wouldn’t surprise me if you are thinking “what is a CD inlay?”, and you would be surprised to know that is one of the names given the the the piece of paper that goes in the back of a CD case, you know the one, it normally has the track listing, a barcode, the text you can read on the sides when the CD case is in the rack? OK here is a picture to help jog your memory…

Even though the album case is still the most popular format of CD packaging, and we are so familiar with it, many people struggle to get the artwork for the CD inlay printing set-up correctly, but don’t worry read on and we will put that straight.

Different types of CD Cases

Most CD pressing plants offer two types of CD cases. These days most people opt for the type of CD album case that is fully transparent/clear, this will allow you to print on both sides of the inlay. If you decide to have the type of case with black clip trays, you will only need artwork for the rear inlay. If you are producing a double CD that is going in a black tray, you will still need artwork for the inside inlay.

CD Inlay Rear / Outside

Most people assume that the area on the back of the CD case where we normally have the track listing and barcode on is square like the CD booklet pages (121 x 120mm). It is actually a different aspect ratio, being much wider and slightly shorter @ 138 width x 118mm height, this does not include the spine area. As the aspect / size is different, if you are using the same image for the booklet and inlay, the inlay version will have to be cropped slightly differently or have the aspect ratio changed, if it is a photo of the artist or band, I don’t recommend altering the aspect by stretching the width, it will make them look like they have put on some weight!

CD Inlay information

The sort of information that is normally included on the CD Inlay is, the tack listing, the barcode, record label and distributor information & logos, contact details (email, website, facebook or myspace), copyright text and the catalogue number. A fairly recent trend for albums with a large number of tracks, is to have the information rotated by 90 degrees, by doing this is you are utilising the extra width. It does help with fitting on large track lists, but otherwise I would tend to stick with the traditional top to bottom text arrangement.

We are often asked where it is best to put the CD barcode on the CD inlay, and to be honest it doesn’t really matter from the point of view of CD manufacturers, distributors or retailers. The size of the barcode is another consideration, there is no industry wide standard for barcode size, but we recommend approximately 15 x 30mm as a good safe option. If your barcode is at the edge of the page, your barcode artwork will need enough room for “bleed“.

The Outside CD Inlay Spines

Our final tip for the rear inlay artwork is the one that causes most confusion. Along both sides of the CD rear inlay we have an area called the spine. This is the artwork that runs up the side of the album case where you normally have the name of the artist, the album tittle and the catalogue number.

In order to be read the right way up when in a rack or storage system that has the discs stored horizontally the spine on the left of the inlay should read from bottom to the top, and the text on the right hand spine should read from top to bottom.

CD Inlay Rear | Correct Orientation for the spines

The spine width is 6.5mm and from a visual point of view and in order to allow for any movement during trimming I would not recommend having the text the full width of the spine. It is best practice to allow about 1 – 1.5mm from the edge of the spines.

Inside CD Inlay

If you have a CD album case that has a clear tray / fully transparent you will need to have artwork for the inside of the inlay. Only two main points to consider for this artwork, but they are big ones. Firstly you will need to remember that as the CD case is fully transparent the artwork on the left of the inside inlay will be visible from the front of the case when closed.

CD Inlay Clear Spine Area

The section that is visible is from through the front of the case is about 9mm wide form the inside left hand spine.  If the difference between the artwork of the booklet and the inside inlay is vastly different you may want to consider printing this area as a solid block of colour to match the front page of the booklet and the inlay. I would actually recommend that the section that should be be about 13mm, just to be on the safe side.

If you are designing the inside of the inlay with text in this area to be seen from the front of the case, a maximum width of 9mm is a good safe bet to make sure that the text is not obscured by the front of the case.

CD Disc Holder Area

Another common misconception about the inside of the inlay is that the hub and disc holder section that the CD sits on is in the centre of the artwork, it is actually offset slightly to the right, so if you place an image that you want to appear directly under the disc in the middle of the inlay it will actually not be central to the disc.

The disc holder section is 120mm in diameter, so if you don’t want the image that sits underneath the disc to be visible it should be within this diameter. The actual centre of the disc holder is 80 mm  from the left of the inlay and 59 mm from the bottom, these measurements are from the the edge of the page and exclude bleed. It is also worth noting that when the disc is in place any artwork under the central hole of the disc disc will be seen.

CD Inlay - Inside inlay dimensions - click to enlarge

Making a Dummy of your CD Printing templates

So that about wraps it up for specification for the inlay, but I have one last practical point. Once you have finished your design I would strongly recommend printing the artwork on to a sheet of paper, then using the crop marks cut the booklet & inlay to size and putting this in a CD case.

We call this making a dummy and you can often pick out design elements that don’t work particularly well by doing this, saving the heart ache of getting your order back from your CD printing company only to find out that the design does not work in print as you thought it did on screen.

Go forth and create a great CD Inlay Design

I hope this article makes things a little clearer, to be honest it is one element of designing great CD artwork that even some of the the best designers struggle with. The fact the CD inlay is an integral part of the case, what you see on screen does not always translate to print as you might expect. But if you take the above tips into consideration, you should be almost there with your CD inlay printing.

Cheers

Kev

So you have finally decided to set up the record label that you have long dreamt about. You have been into the studio and recorded your musical masterpiece and have designed a CD album cover that is surely going to be regarded as a seminal crossroads in design.

So with your [...]]]>

So you have finally decided to set up the record label that you have long dreamt about. You have been into the studio and recorded your musical masterpiece and have designed a CD album cover that is surely going to be regarded as a seminal crossroads in design.

So with your master and artwork signed off you pop in to your local CD manufacturing company and one of the first things they ask you is if you have a “Catalogue Number” or “Cat Number”, a what number you ask? So what you want to know is what is a Catalogue / Cat number, what does it do and how do I get one.

Well a Catalogue Number is not that mysterious really, it is just a shortened way of describing a particular product. So imagine  you are in a a band called “The Scratching Dogs” and your album is called “Flea The Scene” on a record label called “One Paw In The Air”, and you phone up your CD Pressing company to ask about the progress of the order, however by the time we type all of that info into the tracking system to get an update, the job will probably be delivered! So from a CD manufacturers perspective it would be handy to have an abbreviated version of all the above information that can be quickly typed into the system.

If you have ever been to Argos or used a mail order catalogue company you will have noticed that if for instance you want to buy a watch you don’t fill out the order form with “Casio LCD Gents TV Remote Control Watch”, instead you will have a set of numbers that are underneath the product description that you use on the order from, such as “254/5642″. This is a catalogue number, it is just a product number to make filling out the order form quicker  and easier.

You don’t have to apply to any organisation to get a catalogue number, you can make this up, it entirely up to you what you use. Generally for Vinyl records and CD pressings a catalogue number will consist of a few letters to describe the record label, and every release will have a particular number assigned to it .So if Pure Music Manufacturing where to set-up a record label, we might use PMM as the first part of our catalogue number, so PMM001 would be the full catalogue number for our first release, PMM002 for our second release and PMM003 for the 3rd.  Or we might use PURE001, PURE002 and PURE003.

Some record labels will add on some additional information to the catalogue number to help identify the type of product. For example, if we had a CD,Vinyl and DVD version of the same album we might have a cat number for the CD album of “PURECD101″, for the vinyl version “PURELP101″ and “PUREDVD101″ for the DVD release.

One of the record labels that was best known for it’s use of catalogue numbers was Manchester’s legendary Factory Records, who always used FAC as the beginning part of the catalogue number  .  They used catalogue numbers for everything and not just the records and CD’s they released. New Orders  “Blue Monday”, the biggest selling 12″ record of all time, was given the Catalogue Number of FAC73, the Haçienda night club was given FAC51, the Haçiendas cat was given FAC 191 and the last ever Factory Records catalogue number was given to Tony Wilson’s coffin, FAC501.

In the above examples we have used three and four letter acronyms followed by 3 numbers, but although common, you don’t have to follow this tradition, you use more letters, start at whatever number you want. It can be anything you want. Of all the jobs I have ever dealt with,  one of Cat numbers that sticks in my head was WE8U2, it tickled me anyway. Some of the larger record labels have gone down the road of using the last 5 or 6 digits of the barcode number as the catalogue number, and although possibly practical, it is incredibly dull, and it doesn’t slip off the tongue that easily.

One thing that will make everyone’s life a little easier is if you place the catalogue number on the artwork, particularly on the spine of the packaging if your product has a spine. Some people also have the cat number on the label as well, but that is not really necessary.

So that’s it, the mysterious catalogue / cat number is really not that mysterious after all.

Those who have looked into CD manufacturing [...]]]> Although many people do not realise it, the humble CD can have mystery, sometimes hidden information & code stored beneath that innocent silver surface.  You should know what this information is and how you can use it to your advantage if you’re manufacturing CD’s.

Those who have looked into CD manufacturing and mastering before may have come across the term “PQ Encoded Master Red Book Master”. So what is Red Book and what is PQ encoding? Red Book actually refers to a an actual book that has a red cover, yup that simple. This book was written by Philips & Sony who created the CD format, the book contains information that defines the CD format, it’s like a rule book to make sure all manufactured CD’s are universally compatible with all players.

It sets out the physical and data standards that must be strictly adhered to if you wish to press CD’s or create software that creates CD masters. Don’t bother going down to the local library to find a copy of this “Red Book” as it is only available from Philips & Sony, and I believe it costs £ 4000.00. It was never going to be a big seller, but vital if you’re involved in providing hardware or software for the CD industry.

So that’s the Red Book bit, what about the PQ encoding. The letters PQ are not an acronym, they refer to what we call “sub channels” or reserved areas of the disc to hold extended information. The CD format has 8 “sub channels” named P, Q, R, S, T, U, V & W that store this additional information about the disc.

The “P” channel is where CD players look for the start and stop time of the individual tracks. The “Q ” channel describes the time coding of the disc, so when you see the time of the track on the display of a CD player, this comes form the “Q” channel. So basically PQ encoding is the information CD players use to find the start and end of the tracks and states the absolute time of the music, so not really that mysterious.

It is the other sub channels (R to W) and the table of contents (TOC) that will be of interest to most people. These can hold a variety of information that you will find useful.

CD Text.

You may have noticed in some CD players it includes the artist and track title on the display whilst playing the disc, this is “CD Text”. You can actually store much more information than this, you can have the name of the “Songwriter”, “Composer”, “Arranger” and a “Message”.

I have always thought that the “Message” area would be more widely used. It is great place to store “Easter Eggs” or hidden information for listeners/ readers to find, especially things like links to websites to download additional information, bonus tracks and live versions of the track. These can be really popular with fans and create a little buzz on forums.

The message line can hold up to 160 characters, does this sound familiar? Yes, this is old skool twitter. So the humble CD has been tweeting before twitter was ever dreamt of. I really think it would be a cool idea to do use this as a theme for a CD. So who is going to be the first to have a fully tweeted CD. If it has been done before, I would love to know!

One word of warning about CD text, as this is encoded in your master, if after the mastering stage you decide to change the name of any tracks, the master will need to be re-made with the new track names encoded. Another thing you should watch out for is that CD recording software sometimes uses the “file name” of the data files as CD text. Quite often I will check a Production Master and it will have CD text encoded with things like “Hold On – 2nd Mix Vox higher mastered”, so if you don’t want this information on the master make sure that writing CD Text is not enabled,  if you are not sure how to do this, correctly name the tracks in the play-list to be sure you do not have any misinformation on the disc.

It is quite common these days for people to play CD’s on laptop and desktop computers and to copy the tracks to portable music players, so you would think this would be the perfect use of CD text. Obviously Apple &  Microsoft don’t believe in using this ready available embedded code that we have spent precious time adding to the masters.

No rather than taking the information from the “horses mouth” they go through a convoluted system of taking the number of tracks on a CD, the running times of the tracks, and then comparing this information to a database of existing CD’s. Now most of us have put CD’s into itunes and it comes up with the wrong information. This is because that with of all of the CD’s that have ever been released, it is not that improbable you might find more than one or two that have the same number of tracks and running time, so this is where the problems stem from.

As far as I am aware, the reason they do this is that you can’t guarantee all CD players can read CD text. But if the CD drive is capable of reading CD text, and nearly all are, why not compare this text to the database, if you know the answer I would love to hear from you in the comments section. So if you get your order back from the CD pressing plant and it does not come up with the correct information in itunes, don’t be too quick to blame your CD manufacturer……..

ISRC Codes

So what is an ISRC code, well it stands for International Standard Recognition Codes. This is a Code that conforms to an International Standard for Recognition of a CD In all seriousness think of it as a barcode for each individual track on a CD, a unique identifiable code that can be linked to a piece of music. These codes are used by broadcasters (radio stations and TV company’s) to automatically log which tracks have been played and for how long, this simplifies the process of calculating royalty payments. So if you have spent a large amount of money recording and releasing a CD it makes sense to make sure you get the money that is owed to you.

We have one client who received no royalties for years for one of his CD’s, then all of a sudden he started to receive small but regular cheques. It turns out that a small radio station in Norway had discovered his music and began regularly playing a particular track. Thanks to the ISRC codes he got enough money for a good few slap up lunches, and found a local distributor to sell a bunch of albums in a new market.

You might be thinking that getting these codes must be difficult or expensive, well actually they are free, and it only takes an email or a phone call to get hold of them. In the UK the PPL are responsible for allocating ISRC codes, you can phone them on 020 7534 1122 or if you would prefer to email them member.info@ppluk.com. You will also find more information on the website.

You will be issued with a 3 character Alpha Numeric code that is your registrant code, this will be something like PU3, this is your and yours only. The full ISRC code is made up of 12 letters and numbers, the first part of the code is identifying the country of origin, for Great Britain this is GB, easy enough. The next part is for the year, this is a 2 digit number, so for 2010 the number “10″, for 2011 the number is “11″, still with me? The final 5 digits are numbers and are for you to choose, most people start with 1 and work up from there.

I have a preferred system for using ISRC codes, and as this is an entire subject all of it’s own I will create a further blog to cover this in detail. But until then starting at 1 and working your way up is a good system.

CD Barcode

The last of our hidden codes is the barcode number, we all know that barcodes are essential for distribution and retail.  To be honest as far as encoding on CD masters is concerned I really don’t think they are that important at all.

I don’t know of anyone who actually uses this information when encoded on the disc. The CD pressing plants use the catalogue number to identify parts in manufacturing, distributors & retailers scan the barcode from the packaging and broadcasters use the ISRC codes as mentioned above. This capability of adding the barcode to the subcode might have been one of them things that was done in good faith but not properly thought through, but I am more than happy to be corrected.

So that brings us to the end of the hidden codes. Some of these codes you can have fun with (go on add a link to this blog on your CD message). Some might help you to find out if you are the next hot thing in Timbuktu, and earn you a fortune (get that ISRC now!). But armed with this information, go out and be creative, earn money, and feel free to comment or disagree with anything I have written.

Cheers

Kev

Quite often I speak to clients who are self funding their first CD pressing, and they ask me what software they can use to create the artwork and master. If you have a spare £ 3,000 – £ 5,000, then get “Adobe Creative Suite” and the upcoming “SADiE native”, but then again, if [...]]]>

Quite often I speak to clients who are self funding their first CD pressing, and they ask me what software they can use to create the artwork and master. If you have a spare £ 3,000 – £ 5,000, then get “Adobe Creative Suite” and the upcoming “SADiE native”, but then again, if you have that sort of spare money, I would get a professional mastering engineer and designer on the case. But then sometimes budgets are limited and I am asked what cheap, or better still, free software is available to do the job. Actually it is quite surprising how much can be done with free or trial versions of software. But let’s not forget that things have not always been quite so simple…………

Up until the mid 1970′s, if you wanted to release a record you almost certainly had to be signed to a large record label. As soon as the ink on the contract had dried, you would be ushered to a world class studio to spend the next six months recording your epic début. But then along came Punk, and things would never be the same again.

Many who followed the Punk scene would watch a band, buy their single, and then think “I could do that”. And they did, lots of them. It was not so easy to make your own records back then, company’s like Pure Music Manufacturing did not exist, major record companys owned their own pressing plants and had mastering rooms and printers queuing up to do their work. This was not the case for the budding record label owner, they would have to find a mastering room, then a pressing plant and someone to print the labels and  the sleeves and would have to arrange for all these elements to be collected and delivered to the right place, at the right time. A bit of a nightmare to be honest.

Then some bright spark thought, lets set-up a company where bands can come to a “one stop shop” and just drop off the master-tapes and artwork and organise the rest. I would like to say that bright idea was mine, but it wasn’t, I was still in short trousers at this time.

A new music revolution was borne, with independent record labels springing up all over the country, and it didn’t stop with Punk, in the early 80′s the “indie” music scene took off and then in the late 80′s it was acid house. And this “indie” ethos continues today.

One of the things that has been associated with independent record releases is a DIY element to it all. It is quite normal for the band and the label owner to be involved in everything from recording, mixing, mastering to creating the artwork. Up until recently you would still need to to go to a professional mastering engineer to produce the master and a graphic designer to create the artwork. But today it is possible to to produce really great artwork and perfectly acceptable masters on nearly any computer, allowing the label or artist to take full control of the creative process “in house” and provide masters and artwork to CD manufacturers.

A word of warning though, if time and budget allows, I ALWAYS recommend having a professional do the mastering & design. But then I suppose it wouldn’t be DIY, and I know DIY is what some of our smaller clients want. The next thing I will say, you can give a man a set of knives, but it doesn’t make him a chef. If you feel you are completely out of your depth getting to grips with the software you need to create masters or artwork, call in the professionals. On the other hand, if you know the basics and are willing to learn, have a go, it can be fun, and you will normally find the answers to most common problems on the internet, google is truly your friend.

Desktop Publishing & Image Editing Tools

Adobe Creative Suite 5

No it’s not free, but Adobe offer a 30 day free trial, and during the trial the software is FULLY functional. That’s the good news, the bad news, this software suite is huge, and I mean a behemoth. You could spend a lifetime learning all the tricks and features of the full suite, I have been using it for years and still find new things to play with.  If you are already familiar with the Adobe Creative suite the 30 day trial should give you enough time to create your artwork. However it could be a steep learning curve for those not familiar with this package. Remember after the 30 day trial you will not be able to go back and edit the artwork, unless you downloaded the trial to another computer, but that would be cheeky!

My advice, just concentrate on InDesign and Photoshop, unless you have good reason to delve into the vector graphics of Illustrator.  Please, please, please remember, Photoshop is best suited to editing images and photos, InDesign is best used for text layout. Yes, you can do all your text layout in Photoshop, but that is not what it does best.

If you know how to layout text in Photoshop, then you can do it in InDesign. I am going to do a future blog to explain the reasons I don’t recommend text layout in Photoshop, but for now just take my word for it. We also provide templates for all of vinyl, DVD and CD packaging in this format.

Gimp

This is surprisingly good photo / image editing software, and it is completely free. It has many of the features of Photoshop, but maybe not quite as easy to use, again as with Photoshop, DO NOT use it to layout text, it will look dreadful. The only other major drawback is that it does not support working in the CMYK colour space that it required for professional print, however it is possible to convert the RGB images that it produces into CMYK in other software.

Scribus

A free Desk Top Publishing / Page mark-up program that offers many of the core features of InDesign, but again as with gimp, it can be a little more tricky to get the best out of this package. With a bit of care, there is no reason why you can’t get really good artwork done with this software, it also supports exporting as PDF files. But, and there is always a but, it does not support bleed in the page layout, a bit of a major omission for desktop publishing software. The work around to this is to make your page size large enough to include bleed, and design with this in mind.

OpenOffice

The open source version of Microsoft Office comes with a drawing / page layout package called “Draw”. Behind the surface you will find some really good tools, it works in CMYK and makes PDF files, so you can get some really good work done here. There a few drawbacks, it does not support bleed, so you will have to build this into the page set-up, and it can feel a little fiddly to use, but that might be because I am used to Adobe products.

Having said all of that, I believe that much of the artwork that we get supplied from packages like InDesign and Quark, could easily be done with”Draw”.

Cute PDF

We are often asked if we can accept files from X, Y Z unknown to us software that has been downloaded from the internet or that has come pre-installed on a computer. The answer is “no” if the software does not support exporting artwork in common file formats, most CD manufacturers prefer to work from PDF files these days .

Most of these types of software cannot produce PDF files, but Cute PDF will install a PDF print driver that will allow you to print as a PDF file. The process is fairly simple, you send your artwork to print as normal, but select the Cute PDF printer instead of your usual paper printer, this will then ask you to save a PDF file.

The PDF output settings will need to be set for high resolution print, at least 300 DPI for colour and grayscale images, and 2400 DPI for black and white images.

CD Mastering & Audio Editing Tools

DDP Creator

I was in two minds about recommending this software, not because there is anything wrong with it, quite the opposite, it is utterly brilliant. It’s that this is a relatively small company that give a 15 day fully functional trail of the software, I wouldn’t like to see people take too much advantage of this generosity. If you make CD masters, even on an infrequent basis, and your current mastering software does not make DDP files, this is a great investment that will pay for itself very quickly. I should know, as I use this on a daily basis.

So what does it do? Quite simply it allows you to sequence your audio files in the correct order, set the desired gaps between tracks, add CD Text information, add ISRC codes and create a CD-R master, and more importantly a DDP master. DDP files are the best ways to supply masters to CD manufacturing companys for glass mastering, as they allow fast transfer by FTP with the ability of quickly checking the files for errors.

At first it looks quite basic, and in some ways it is, but like all great software, it gives you powerful tools with rock solid reliability with the minimum of clutter. I know that some top end mastering engineers were consulted overt the user interface, and it shows.

Orban Loudness Meter

“But these go to 11″ And thanks to the legendary Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap we all know that 11 is one louder than 10! But in all seriousness, the human ear is great at judging level, but it can’t tell you what the digital level on an audio file is, but this handy tool can help. And a bunch of nifty other tricks as well.

We are still entrenched in the “loudness wars” for CD mastering, so don’t use this to see if you can squeeze a little more headroom out of your audio, but a great little program to check peak and average levels. The Orban site has some interesting info on the use of this meter, and it is well worth taking the time to have a read.

Audacity

Let’s get this straight, I am not saying ditch your Sadie, Sequioa or even Wavelab CD mastering software for this, but it really is quite adequate for simple tasks. If all you need to do is get rid of a bit of noise at the beginning or end of a track, or a simple edit, this will do the job nicely. So lets not be too snobby about it. Although I have never played with the effects it comes bundled with, my head tells me they should really be left alone, and if you need “creative mastering” speak to the professionals.

So there you have it, using these tools, you can create artwork and masters to a level that is as good as the professionals. It is also worth mentioning that most of the great album covers over the last 30 years have actually been  fairly basic, a strong image with good typography.  If the images or the idea is weak, the best software in world will not help.

Creative mastering is different to photo editing, it’s not so easy to fix wayward mixes. It’s not just about having some cool software, you will need a good sounding room with high grade monitors. An experienced mastering engineer will be able to listen to your tracks with a fresh set of ears. They will use their experience to make critical judgements and add the final touches to create an “album” from a set of mixes. However, if you are pleased with the mixes that you have come out of the studio with, then compiling the master is not out of your reach.

So now with the money you saved you afford to go for the desirable CD digi-pack that you always wanted.

Of course this is only a small selection of the free / limited time trial software that you can use, if you can think of anything that is worth adding, drop me a comment, and I may add it to the list.

I was originally going to use this blog to provide practical information regarding the CD, DVD and vinyl manufacturing process, however today I am going to  make an exception and talk about a very special lady, who has gone into retirement.

When we started Pure Music [...]]]>

I was originally going to use this blog to provide practical information regarding the CD, DVD and vinyl manufacturing process, however today I am going to  make an exception and talk about a very special lady, who has gone into retirement.

When we started Pure Music Manufacturing in 1992 it was the heyday of the “Madchester” scene, and vinyl was king for our clients. Our venerable Lyrec disc cutting lathe was running constantly, breakdowns and blown disc cutter-heads were a daily occurrence. At that point we did not offer CD mastering in-house, it was just vinyl mastering.

Things were much different back then, and the cost of making a 7” or 12” record was much cheaper than the cost to press CD’s. If I remember correctly it cost about £ 1400.00 to make a 1000 CD albums, and this was prohibitive to most of our clients.

A large part of this cost was creating a CD master, and 1992 the only format you could provide to CD manufacturing company’s to input into the glass mastering machine was a PQ encoded 1630 U-matic tape, this is basically a very large video cassette. The equipment required to produce a 1630 was costly, a full editing system cost about £ 30,000. As we did not have much demand for CD manufacturing during this period, it did not make sense to invest in this type of mastering system, we would farm out our CD mastering work to 3rd party studios. We would supply them with a DAT master, they would transfer this to 1630 and add the PQ points.

However by 1994 the cost of manufacturing CD’s had started to drop, making them more attractive to our clients. Also around this time a new disc format came out, it was called CD-R or “recordable CD”, this type of disc allowed you to actually make a one-off CD. The first recorders cost about £ 25,000, and the discs cost about £ 50.00 each. It was obvious back then that this type of system would never be big in the home market (doh!), but it was a very interesting prospect for CD mastering studios, especially as the cost of the recorders and discs started to drop considerably.

The CD-R disc recording format coincided with the appearance of relatively affordable Digital Audio Workstations (DAW), these computer systems allowed you to record audio onto hard discs and perform editing of the audio! One company called Sonic Solutions pioneered this type of DAW, and this system had the option to attach a CD recorder that would allow you to make a PQ encoded CD master. CD pressing plants then started to accept these discs for glass mastering, negating the need to make a PQ encoded 1630 CD master.

The cost for a Sonic Solutions system with a CD recorder was about £ 14,000, and it started to make good business sense for us to get into CD mastering. We got the finances sorted and and were about to buy a Sonic System, but then we became aware of a small British company called Studio Audio and Digital. They had recently launched their SADiE mastering system, this was very similar to the Sonic Solutions system, but in our view much more powerful, and easier to use.

A comparable SADiE system was also much cheaper than Sonic Solutions, at about £ 8000.00. Based on our initial figures, if we used the system for 3 – 4 years, it would pay for itself and provide a tidy little profit (boy where those figures way out!), So on a cold and windy day in 1994 I made a long drive down to Cambridge to pick-up on our SADiE system and do a spot of training.

With the money we saved on buying SADiE, we could actually relocate the mastering studio to a much larger room with superior acoustics. The day we installed the system was very exciting , I remember everyone gathering around in the studio to watch this little miracle of making a “one off” CD, you could smell the excitement as the Yamaha CD recorder ejected it’s caddy that contained a disc that was promptly played in a CD player. To some it seemed like witchcraft!

Sometimes though this witchcraft didn’t always go according to plan, some CD players really didn’t like this new type of disc, particularly high end audiophile players, we learnt this the hard way. Around this time we did lots of work for a company called So What Arts, this was the management company for Simply Red, and we had been asked to provide a CD of the pre mastered mixes for the album “Life” to Mick Hucknell, his management team and the guys from Warner Music to listen to in Elliot Rashmans office.

A short time later we got a frantic phone call from one of the guys form So What Arts, he said the disc didn’t work and that we should have checked it before sending it to Mick. We had checked all the way through, so we asked them to get the disc back to us and in the meantime we would run another one. When the disc arrived back with us we popped into our CD players and it played fine.

This left the representative from the management company speechless, he couldn’t understand why the very expensive audiophile Hi-Fi system in the managers office couldn’t play the disc. We had to explain that the format was new and that high end systems that where highly tuned just didn’t like the new CD-R format, and that they should try playing the disc on a cheaper player. So back he went and dug out a cheap CD ghetto blaster from reception on which they listened to the album.

Apart from a few compatibility issues of the CD-R format, this SADiE system worked virtually without fault. I can’t recall it ever completely bombing out on us and ruining a session, in the very rare cases it crashed, the system would re-boot and you would be exactly at the point where you had been before the crash. Over the years Studio Audio & Digital would release software updates (free of charge) that would increase the power and flexibility of the system.

In 1998 we closed the mastering studio, this was for personal reasons, the studio was very successful up until the day it closed. We then moved the original SADiE system into the main office where it still performed basic editing, compilation, adding ISRC codes and various other duties. Although we have used other mastering systems since, nothing to me was as fast or stable as SADiE, and the original system we purchased in 1994, housed in a newer host computer with much bigger hard drives and newer Plextor CD-R writers, it just kept on going and going.

I cannot think of any other computer purchase that has performed for so long and for so well, in this day and age we replace systems that are 3 or 4 years old, but this old girl was still going strong 16 years later! To give you an idea of what an achievement this is, the heart of the SADiE classic is a AT&T DSP3210 chip that produces about 33 MFLOPS of processing power, the mobile phone in my pocket today produces about 34 MFLOPS.

For our original £ 8000.00 investment, this system produced the masters that went on to press over 40 million CD’s, and was the front end for cutting more than a million vinyl records. To be honest these are rough calculations I have done in my head, the actual figure could be much higher. So you’re probably wondering what has happened to this system, has she died, finally blown AT&T DSP3210 chip?

Nope………………

We have recently upgraded all of our computer systems to Windows 7, now the poor girl is still running on Windows 98, and it’s been a complete drag getting the new machines to talk to her over the network. So we have decided to put her into retirement, we discussed what to do with the system, I considered having the main XS board framed and put on the wall. Then it occurred to us that if the machine we now use for editing masters goes down for any reason, we can just plug the old girl back in as an emergency backup. And this has already happened once, cheers Windows 7.

The reason she’s no longer in daily use is not due to a hardware failure or that it’s just not up to the job any more, no it’s just because the new computers won’t talk nicely to her. I can see why they have the hump, can’t imagine they will be in our office in 16 years time.
So a big shout out to the people at Studio Audio and Digital, now owned by Prism Sound, thank you for building one hell of a workstation. The company went on to constantly improve the hardware and each revision was given a new name, the original hardware configuration released all those years ago is now referred to as “SADiE classic”, and I can understand why, it was an absolute classic system.

Today she is is packed away in a dark storage cupboard, a slightly undignified place for a system that has mastered music for some of the biggest recording artists in the world. Even I agree that placing this old computer on plinth in the office might be slightly weird. However if you happen to find yourself in our offices at some point in 2013, and you see me at my desk graced with an old beige PC box, a glass of champagne and wearing a party hat, don’t think I have gone mad, as I will be celebrating her 18th birthday. At 18 they say a girl turns into a woman, but she has always been a lady of distinction.