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.
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.
CD sized laserdiscs? Aren't laserdiscs simply 12" sized CDs?
Laserdiscs are analogue encoded, CDs are digital.