Burning large quanitities of CDs....?

[Kruzin]

Can anyone suggest a method of producing large #s of CDs for distibution? I'm talkin on the order of several thousand per month, with minimal time investment (so it does not require constant baby-sitting), and without contracting them out.

Can you, for example, install 10 SCSI burners on a machine, and have them all burning copies of the same thing at the same time?
Or is there a better piece of hardware that can crank them out quickly?

Cost of the hardware is not as much of an issue as being able to get them burned in volume...

[Ribbit]

I believe Plextor make stand-alone CD-copy stations which can make several copies of a CD at once.

Edit: They've been discontinued, and Wombat's solution is far better anyway.

[Wombat]

If you're actually looking at 1000's of CDs, you might want to invest in a duplicating machine. I don't know much about them, except that it's what you use for larger-scale duplication (used to see ads in the back of electronics mags and such). It seems that a lot of them are switching to burners now, but I didn't think that was always the case.

There are burner set-ups like this http://www.niscoa.com/product/cdd.html. The more expensive ones have CD-R reserviors that they fill themselves from - put 100 discs in, and come back when it has 100 discs done.

[Kruzin]

Thanks Wombat, that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind.

[az]

Why don't you want to outsource it?

AZ

[impact]

I have heard about this before... home made pr0n, it is a way to get a lot of cash fast... but... would YOU want to have some guys from a CD factory look at pics of your nekkid wife without actually paying for it?

[az]

You don't like Kruzin, do you?

AZ

[KeiFront]

Impact is just looking for some cheap pr0n

[Kruzin]

What an ignorant statment.
You might only be interested in your porn, but this is for a serious, legitimate purpose, so I'll thank you to keep your snide comments to yourself.

The true reason for this is for a new job I am hopefully starting this week.

https://acceleratedschools.org

What this is needed for is to publish and distribute various educational materials world-wide, at minimal cost. The school ships these CDs out for $2.99, and many for free.
Currently they are producing them at a rate of about 1000 per month, but it is being done by a single person on a single burner right now, and they can't keep up with the demand.

They don't want to source them out, because they need to keep costs as low as possible, and when purchasing them in lots of 500-1000, they would still cost more than what they give them away for.

[az]

I _think_ I've seen VERY low rates for CD duplication here, lower than the cost of CDRs + electricity (not to mention time), especially for large quantities. For quantities over 1,000 or so pieces, the glass master is free, too.

AZ

[Kruzin]

The problem is that they don't want to order them in quantities that large, because there are many different CDs available....so if they do a thousand a month, that might be 10 different CDs 100 times each. They don't want to stock up on thousands of one particular type of CD, because the content is often changing with the addition of new information. They want to be able to have their office personel burn them in various quantities as needed.

[az]

Ahh I begin to understand

That would be expensive, obviously. I don't know any offers with free glass masters for those "small" quantities...

AZ

[Kruzin]

Here's the sort of rig I think I'll try to sell them on

http://www.copypro.com/

with one of these for the labeling

[dsp]

Kruzin,

I've found that duplicating 1000 CD's a month isn't all that bad (the labelling is ) and could easily be done with a 4 drive SCSI machine (or a cheaper standalone burner tower). Printing the labels directly on the CD takes special CD's and more time than the burning does (more than labels in some cases). To do small runs of 100 is really easy and doesn't take that long with a 4 drive system (maybe 3 hours duplicating time)

Just some personal experience (worked for a CD duplication company here).

dsp

[Kruzin]

The idea, though, is to free up an office person from having to sit there and swap disks. 3 hours doesn't seem like much itself, but multiply that by 10 for 1000 disks/month, and then by 12 for a year. That adds up to 360 hours/year. An automated system that can do the labeling and everything unattended (as the units above can do) will save many, many hours of office work, thus paying for itself in a fairly short time.

Pop in 100 blanks when leaving the office in the evening, come back in the morning, and have 100 burned and labled CDs ready to ship out. Maybe 1/2 hour is spent instead of 3 hours. If that office worker is making, say, $15/hour, that saves 37 bucks for every run of 100...or well over $4000/year...