Normally, new customers are required to place a 75% deposit on all orders. If you prefer, you may prepay for your entire order. The remainder of your balance shall be due prior to either shipment from our plant facilities or prior to pickup from our Corporate offices.
We give you a refund for any money that you have been charged that we haven’t produced that service for as of the time that you cancel. In the industry the technical description of this policy is “all unused monies will be returned.” Please note that any services and items that have been completed, including design work completed, film output, direct-to-plate processing, and any elements transfer fees normally included in the cost of replication (normally $23) , will still be invoiced if completed (whether or not it is an item that you can use once the order has been cancelled).
Our official policy states that if there is a mechanical defect with your CDs or printing, or if your printing is not “acceptable to within industry standards”, then we will promptly replace it. While custom manufactured items are not refundable for a cash refund, if there is anything wrong with your replicated and printed product, we will take the steps to fix it. Note that this does not included things that might have gone wrong on your end before you sent us the elements for duplication, so please be careful when you are preparing your masters and artwork.
The maximum time that is guaranteed on the production of CDs is 78 minutes (78:00:00), however there are some older CD players that will not allow a CD of that length to play correctly. Note that there are currently two CD-R sizes: 650 Megabytes and 700 Megabytes. If you intend to put more than 74 minutes of music on your CDs, you will need to use a 700MB blank for your master. Be careful when creating your program, though, as the 700MB CD-R will actually allow you to make an 80 minute program (which will not replicate accurately onto an actual CD).
We give all our manufacturing customers the opportunity to distribute their music, including a free barcode for their CDs, and free digital distribution of their release on our website, plus many sites and services worldwide, such as Amazon, Youtube, Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music and the iTunes store, and many others. An easy-to-fill out form for you to sign up for this service will appear directly after you've placed your order on our site. If you have more questions, you can speak to your account representative about this great opportunity.
We'll also help you to distribute your physical media (CD, DVD, VINYL) via wholesale, to stores, and on other websites, with a small setup fee.
Although the duplication prices for our magnetic-based mediums like VHS tapes and cassettes are based on length of the cassette, CDs are made using a different process that does not vary in price based on length.
The maximum lengths for business card CDs and specialty shaped CDs vary based on the shape selected. Each of our specialty products has a maximum size listed next to it in our custom products section. If you will be creating your own shape for a CD and submitting it to us, the maximum amount of music/information you can put on the CD will be determined after we have received your shape diagram and your order has been placed. We recommend that you review similar shapes to give yourself a rough idea of how much information will be able to be placed onto your proposed shape.
We use several different types of printing on disc surfaces (CD/CD-R/DVD/DVD-R/BluRay. On short run orders, we use a digital transfer process or rimage printing.
On runs of 300 or more (replication), we use either a high definition silk-screening process or offset printing. Offset printing may require an additional fee on order quantities under 1000 units.
There are some limitations to the silkscreen method, as follows: The reproduction of realistic designs and photographs, as well as color transitions and gradients, will not look exactly the same as similar items which are printed using an offset process, so you may want to consider upgrading to offset printing of your disc surface. For technical information about these limitations, please review our section on silkscreen printing.
The type of printing that we use on the disc surface of a CD-R or DVD-R is a special transfer process which adheres a high resolution digitally printed image directly onto the white surface of our high quality disc media. Normally, our customers select CD-R or DVD-R duplication when they are either 1) ordering less than 300 units, or 2) in a big hurry for an order of 300-500 units.
All printing of CD inserts in quantities of 500 units or higher is done using offset printing. Some products (including eco-wallets and digipaks and stapled booklets) are also offset-printed on quantities between 300 and 499 units as well.
Offset print jobs are done primarily on large format presses with sophisticated coordinate control, so that the color matching for each individual print job can be done accurately. Certain larger booklet sizes and/or jobs with custom color configurations are printed on presses by themselves, with no other print jobs happening at the same time. We primarily use a process called "Direct-To-Plate" printing which creates print-ready metal plates at 2540 dpi resolution and skips the step of creating Lithographic Film Negatives (also just called “Films”). Although we don't usually accept customer supplied film for most print jobs, we can assist with the handling of film conversion projects.
Orders under 300/500 units (depending on the booklet/folder size & type) are printed using laser printers specifically calibrated for CD insert printing and specially designed paper which makes it easy to complete the finish work for the print job once the designs have been printed on the paper. When we print lower quantities using Laser printing, we do not create a “plate” or use films. Instead, we print directly from your art files, which saves some money in setup costs. Note that the resolution of inserts printed using laser printers (600 dpi continuous tone) is somewhat lower than that of our offset printing. This difference tends to create a somewhat different final look for the inserts, but still satisfactory for most of our customers needs.
On most all of our print jobs for inserts, we use what is called CMYK printing. Regardless of the program you are using to create your artwork, you will need to set the program to use CMYK color mode. This is easy with most professional design programs, as well as with layout programs such as QuarkXpress, Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign, and others. Some other programs which are primarily designed for web applications will not allow you to set your color mode to CMYK. Normally, our design/prepress staff can make this change for you, but the colors shown in the final output of your inserts will vary somewhat from that which you either saw or printed using your original application.
When we do the silkscreen printing for the surface of your CDs, there are several significant differences in the printing method that are important to be aware of. They are as follows: 1) because the surface of an unprinted compact disc is reflective silver, colors printed directly on this surface will look different from images that are printed directly on a white surface. To compensate for this difference, we generally print a white base (normally referred to as a white flood) before printing the image on the disc. 2) in silkscreen printing, solid colors image better than colors which are built using a color separation process, so many designers choose to create art which utilizes more basic design concepts that make use of more solid colors than separated colors.
To allow for these two basic preferences, we use two different printing modes for on-disc printing. The first is called spot color printing, and we use an internationally standardized color system called the Pantone Matching System (AKA "PMS Color" printing). The other type of printing that we do is for full-color disc designs (CMYK printing).
We nearly always print a white flood coat before we print the CMYK image on the disc, to help the colors achieve a reasonably good match for any similar images that are being used on accompanying inserts.
We normally refer to this five color printing process as CMYK+White printing.
In order to set up the image for on your disc surface, you will need to set the color mode to whichever of the above printing methods you wish to use (CMYK or PMS). While it is relatively easy to set your design work and monochromatic images to CMYK in most any design program (or convert any color pictures from RGB mode to CMYK mode if necessary), it is somewhat more difficult to convert from RGB to Pantone colors with most photo manipulation programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, Indesign, or Illustrator.
If, on the other hand, you are trying to turn a full color image into a duotone or tritone or monotone, you will first need to make these conversions in a program such as Adobe Photoshop or inDesign, and then place them into one of the other programs above.