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Burn the CD on Both Sides
apocal writes "How cool wouldn't it be to be able to burn the label on your cd using the same laser you used to burn the cd in the first place? Well, I guess this technology called LightScribe will be coming soon. 'Suppose you have just created a compilation CD of a dozen or so of your favorite songs. Now you want to make a label that contains the song titles, artists' names, and some personal information and design elements to make it special. First, burn your tracks onto the data side of the disc. Then open your favorite LightScribe-enabled label-making software and go to the CD template work area. Now you do all of your creative design workcompose pictures, copy, artwork whatever. When you are satisfied with what you have done, take the disc out of your drive, flip it over to the label side and put it back in the drive. Now go back to your label-making software, and simply click print.'"
Yamaha came out with something similar back in 2002 called DiscT@2 that let you put text and graphics on the unused portions of the data side. It never really took off.
It combines the CD or DVD drive of your computer with specially coated discs and enhanced disc-burning software to produce precise, silkscreen-quality, iridescent labels.
I think I'll pass.
*cough* advert *cough*
...or more.
But only on the "writable" side, using the remaining space, so i.e. you burn 200M of data which forms a uniform circle in the middle of the disc, then use remaining 500M to "draw" the picture using the property of CD that it slightly changes color after it's written. I think some Yamaha writers had this feature.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
LightScribe is actually an Hewelett Packard product, so the chances of this technology actually being licensed and incorporated in regular disk drives and media is pretty good.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Don't Use Sharpies on CD-R: There is a modest amount of anecdotal evidence that the use of solvent-based ink markers (Sharpies use an alcohol-based ink), particularly on CD-R/RWs without a protective coating and CD-R/RWs kept in a warm to hot environment can lead to long-term penetration of the ink to the data layer with resulting damage to the data.
First, I agree this reads more like an ad. Second, this really cannot be called "news" under any circumstances, let alone on /. -- this was in PC World in *March*: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,114592,t k,wb030804x,00.asp
Dupe from 9 months ago! They even have the same CD "Vacation in Hawaii" pictured on both sites.
As the article says (you did read it, right?), you need a special drive in order to print the labels. So there should be no problem related to "violation of garantee".
Is the SHARPIE marker safe for writing on CD's?
Sanford has used SHARPIE markers on CDs for years and we have never experienced a problem. We do not believe that the SHARPIE ink can affect these CDs, however we have not performed any long-term laboratory testing to verify this. We have spoken to many major CD manufacturers about this issue. They use the SHARPIE markers on CDs internally as well, and do not believe that the SHARPIE ink will cause any harm to their products.
Why is that? I've been doing it for ages (still have CD's burnt + labeled from '99) without a problem.
Note that I'm not debating your point, I'd genuinely never heard this before.
You are correct about the recording surface, but wrong about the "protection" thing.
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Labels on CDR(w) media tends to be a _bad_ thing.
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/11/08/043254.sh
CD sized laserdiscs? Aren't laserdiscs simply 12" sized CDs?
Laserdiscs are analogue encoded, CDs are digital.
The need to purchase special media is actually a plus in my book. AFAIK, this will be the first labelling solution for optical discs that was actually designed by people who have to make optical discs work correctly. No spin imbalance due to "painting" on only parts of the disc, no chemicals leaching through to the other side, etc. If I can make a lovely graphical label without worrying that it will decrease the odds the disc will be readable in 5 years, that will likely be worth a modest price penalty in media to me. At this point, there is still no word on what the price penalty will actually be for a drive or for the media.
The real disadvantages are: quite slow to burn (think 20 minutes for a complex graphic) that high-res image, and only monochrome. So, if you sell software, don't think this is going to be a neat way of producing labels for shipped product.
What it will be really cool for is things like handing a home movie DVD to your inlaws with a picture of their grandson burned on the disc. For casual writing, I'll still use a special felt pen. For high-value discs that I'm going to bother to make a custom jewel case jacket for, I'm definitely looking to Lightscribe as my on-disc labelling solution.
Close but wrong. Remember he said data on BOTH SIDES. Your trick just causes the drive to view the double density disk as high density. In both cases the 3.5 was always double sided.
The GP was referring to old single sided 5.25" floppy disks. On the edge of each disk was a notch cut out of the plastic. You'd cover the notch with a shinny metallic sticker to write protect the disk. Someone figured out that you could cut a similar notch on the other side and flip the disk over. This became very common and you could buy special tools to make the notch with proper alignment. Eventually, software publishers used the trick to reduce disk count.
This wouldn't work with double side drives (Like in the XT) but worked great with the C64 and Atari 8 bits. Not sure about the Apple II.