Friday, April 16, 2010

Print on Demand (POD) model

TrepStar.com cdDVDfulfillment is a service very similar to the print on demand (POD) model for book publishing.  Instead of printing books, we burn, package, and ship cds or dvds directly to your customer.  We produce the cd or dvd on demand, at order time, in any quantity, and ship directly to your customer to anywhere in the world.

This "burn on demand" or "manufacture on demand" cd and dvd fulfillment will save you money by avoiding the hassle of buying large quantities of inventory that may grow stale.  You do not need to warehouse, produce, ship, package, or deal with shipment issues.  This saves you money, especially if you're not sure what kind of demand your product will enjoy.  If your product changes, you existing inventory becomes obsolete.  This is not the case with burn on demand services like ours.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Is TrepStar.com cdDVDFulfillment better than CD Baby?

CD Baby is a large online distributor of independent music. They do sell and distribute music, and have a large following, but charge more per order than TrepStar.com cddvdfulfillment.

TrepStar.com is like CD Baby in that we want you to make as much money as possible on your music.  We can keep our costs low because we do not have distributors and do not have to pay any major labels.

We sell the music that musicians send us directly, or upload to our servers.

These days, most musicians have a myspace or facebook page.  Just put a paypal button on your site to sell your music.  The orders from paypal come into our system and we make and sell your music cd at order time and ship it out to your customer anywhere in the world the same day, or next day.

We can help you get your music on iTunes.

Unlike CD Baby, you take in the money first when working with TrepStar.com.  With CD Baby, they take the money, take out a fairly large cut, then give you the remainder.  While they do pay you more than a major record label, at TrepStar.com, you are in control.    You can charge whatever you like for the cd, and simply pay us the fixed cost for TrepStar.com (about $6.20 for a cd, in jewel case, with graphic 2 panel insert, shrink wrapped, in bubble mailer, INCLUDING postage to any USA address -- costs a little more to ship overseas).     You can also buy multiple quantities at a discount if you sell your cds on the road or at your gigs.

Our site is fully automated, and if you have questions, we respond to voice or email within a 24 hour period.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

How do I make and exact copy of my Audio CD.

This is a confusing topic.  If you have an audio CD mastered just the way you like it, and you want us to copy it exactly, you need to mail it to us so we can make a proper image file of the disc.  Learn More about our easy setup

If you're not concerned about making an exact copy, but just want it to work on audio cd players (which will also work on all computers, all car cd players, and most dvd players), you can simply zip up your .mp3 or .wav files and use that to make the disc.  This works perfectly well, but some people want to have an exact copy to preserve cd-text information already burned on their original cd master.  If you do not know what this is, you probably don't need to make an exact cd copy.  To learn more about setting up your basic project for audio cds, look at our video Audio CDs (on trepstar.com)

To make an exact CD copy:

1) Mail it to us.  We charge a one time  $5.00 per disc setup charge.  Learn More about our $5.00 easy setup

Note: .gi files are for audio cds.  .iso files are for DVDs or Data CDs that are not audio cds.
cdtext, cd-text,cd text

How do I create or check CD-Text on my audio cds

CD Text. Learn about it on Wiki cd text

If you mail us your audio cd, we can make an image file here that preserves the CD Text.

If you provide a zip file with .mp3 files or .wav files, we burn them using your project name as the album title and your file names as the track names.

CD Text can be used to populate internet databases that programs like iTunes and Windows Media player use to identify an album.

CDText is barely used these days.  It's best if you get a copy of your CD made from TrepStar (order a copy for yourself), then use the online databases gracenote or Allmusic to submit your CD.  This is how most media players (iTunes, Windows Media Player) gets information about your CD. 


You need to upload the track and CD title information to the free service at gracenote.com.  You can also add this data on your own computer through iTunes.  Then the titles of the tracks and the CD title will appear when the CD is uploaded on any computer to iTunes or Windows Media.

To view the CD-Text on any cd you have, including those we make for you, you need a free program like VLC Media player or audiograbber (Audio grabber).

1) VLC Media Player download page https://www.videolan.org/index.html




2) Audio grabber download page:   http://www.audiograbber.org/ http://www.audiograbber.org/download.html or Audio Grabber Free download

Audio Grabber looks like this: Your CD-Text will not be displayed yet.  Look below for details:















By default, album and track titles are “grabbed” from internet databases such as freedb. Important: To check your discs CD-Text data, choose the menu setting “CD-Get Track Names from CD-TEXT”

cdtext,cd text

TrepStar.com cdDVDfulfillment FAQ Help and Search

FAQ Help & Search
We produce your CD/DVD/USB Flash drive at order time.
These "On Demand", "Just in Time", "one off", "short run", CDs or DVDs or USB thumb drive products will be mailed directly to your customers (normally the next business day), in any quantity, and shipped to anywhere in the world with a USPS address.