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[glynor]

I've been recently burning a bunch of discs, trying to clean out the old video dreck from my media RAID drive and free up some space.  For this mission, I've been very interested in using MC's built-in Label Printing Wizard to assist me in labeling the discs.  Unfortunately, the experience has been less than ideal, and almost unusable...

First off, to explain some details:

I have a Primera BravoII CD Duplicator.  This cool (but tempermental sometimes) device has the ability to print directly onto inkjet-printable discs.  It shows up in Windows just like a regular old printer, and has a fairly normal print driver.  I'm able to print directly to it using any layout or design program I've tried (Freehand, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc) without issue, and even with much less adept programs (Word, MS Paint, Notepad, PowerPoint, etc).  All you do is set your page size to 120mm x 120mm square, and print.  The driver automatically crops off any portion of the image that doesn't "fit" (the hub of the CD or the outside edge of the disc).  The driver provides the proper page size(s) in it's Paper Size section, and most applications "just work".

I have a few issues with MC's label printing wizard.  First off, I can't directly print to my disc publisher.  I'm not sure why, but no matter what I do, MC "prints" a completely blank disc.  This applies when I "actually" print the disc, and when I hit the Preview button as well.



I suspect that this has to do with the Media options in the Wizard.  I'm not positive about this of course, but I'm guessing that these options (see pic below) override the selected Paper Size selected in the print driver.  Therefore, since it is trying to "print" a 8.5 x 11" piece of paper to my printer, it crops it at the top and ends up blank.  Again, this is just a guess, but it seems to make rational sense.



So, in order to use the CD Label Wizard with my disc publisher, I need to print to PDF first, then open the resulting PDF in Acrobat, crop it to the proper 120mm x 120mm size, then print to the publisher via Acrobat.  Unfortunately, that ridiculous hoop-jumping doesn't even solve all my problems....

My other big problem is related to the limitations of the design of the disc label.  I use "hub printable" inkjet discs for basically all of my burning tasks.  These discs are nice because the printable surface of the disc goes all the way to the center hub.  There's no large plastic ring in the middle, and it lets you print almost all the way to the center.



Again, this is something that is handled completely by my printer driver.  The application you're printing from doesn't have to know or care about this setup.  In the print driver, you can define the inner and outer dimensions of the discs you're printing to, and it handles the appropriate cropping.

But, MC's label printing wizard does not allow you to eliminate or modify the width of the center ring of the "donut" even in the "advanced" label editor.  Even cheap CD labeling apps (SureThing and similar apps) typically allow this, and it means that my discs (if I jump through the above hoops to get them to print at all) print with a large white ring in the middle, blocking even my background image.

[glynor]

One other thing I can't figure out how to do, if it's even possible, is to customize the templates used.  If I could permanently customize the "Front Cover" template, I suspect I could actually get around my "donut ring" issue, by just using the front cover print instead.  Unfortunately, I can't figure out a way to create my own Label Theme, so I'd have to do my customization each and every time...

Oh, and going to Help --> Contents from within the CDLabeler mini-app, results in a Page Not Found error in the Help Viewer.

[JONCAT]

Hey Glynor - how's it going. How tied to MC are you for label making. I have been using Acoustica Label Maker with good results albeit for images printed to disc. Are you trying to print track lists onto the discs as well?

It would be nice not to need a 3rd party app to print onto printable media. So there is no option to actually print to disc in the MC Disc Labeler? I'll have to check this out when I get home.

DC

[glynor]

Are you trying to print track lists onto the discs as well?

I am.

The issue with using a third-party app is that I actually need to be able to "print" the label (with the track listing) before I burn the discs.  I want to be able to select a set of files (often video files, but sometimes audio or images as well) in MC and send that list of files to a label maker wizard, then burn the files separately. You typically can't do this with regular label wizards.  They want to work with a disc after it's been burned in order to generate the track titles and whatnot.  This works beautifully in MC as is, but the actual printing doesn't seem to work like any other application out there...

The reason I need to print before I burn is because there is actually another step that I didn't bother to mention (it has no impact on MC's part of the equation).  The BravoII is actually a robotic CD/DVD duplicator, in addition to a printer.  It can burn a disc and print the label in the same step, and you can queue multiple different "jobs" and set them to run and it'll go until it runs out of blank discs in the input bin (or until it brain hemorrhages and needs to be rebooted but that's a different story).

The way you do this is to "print" to the duplicator but you enable the "print to file" option available in the standard Windows printer interface.  This dumps the raw rasterized output that would normally be sent to the printer to disk instead.  You then take that file, and select it as part of the burning process using the Primera software (which can control the robotics on the duplicator).  That way, you can queue up 7 different jobs, and come back and they're all done and properly labeled.



As it is, I'm manually building the labels in Illustrator, by actually printing the MC label wizard to PDF, then opening the PDF and selecting the file list, copy/paste into my Illustrator template, and then printing that file to the "file".  I then take that file and use it to burn my disc through the Bravo interface.  Quite a few hoops to jump through because MCs label printing wizard doesn't seem to obey my page size!

[glynor]

Actually... I went in to make a screenshot of the "Print to File" option, and discovered it wasn't there!  I also discovered that MC is completely mangling the printer's Properties dialog, making it impossible to set advanced print settings.  This issue applies to other printers as well, so is not a "duplicator specific" issue at all.

Here's a screenshot of MC's Label Wizard Print dialog:


Here's the standard Windows print dialog (from Word):


The Print Setup dialog on the right is the first one that comes up.  As you can see, it is quite different from the standard windows dialog.  I'm not able to choose "print to file" or set any other print options (most of which would likely be irrelevant but still) in the main Print Setup dialog.  Worse, when I hit properties, I can't access any of my printer's configuration options below the "Calibration" options dialog because MC displays a useless (and weird) "Change Option Title" graphic and cuts off part of the Properties dialog (giving no way to scroll down).

This second part looks like skinning issues, but the first thing is just an intentional "blocking" of one of the standard Windows features.