Building your own CD-R duplication tower

this is an idea purely off the top of my head ... i dont now how feasible it would be ... but here it goes anyway ...

you could build some sort of buffering bus that took the IDE input from one drive and split it to all the drives ... the drives would all have to be identical models for this to work ... as far as the computer was concerned it would be talking to one drive ... the signals would just be sent to all the drives in parallel ... hrm ... the possibilities!

how does this sound for a mega hack? ... 1 CD drive + 10-100 CD-RW drives + custom splitter thing + one mini-itx board (booting off a compact flash card) = rather cool hack!

but i dont know the first thing about IDE protocols or how possible this all is ... anyone care to enlighten me?

or you could go down the software route and save yourself alot of time/effort ... but it wouldnt be anywhere near as cool

TOM

And it's cheap, too:

http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=DUPEII-S-PB&cat=CAS

That's a pretty cool option but I was kind of looking for something that could dupe more than one CD at a time...which is why I was looking to make my own. That IDE buffer that you mentioned TOM sounds a bit tricky so I would probally go the software route, ideas anyone??

I'm kind of in this for the hack but I'm also trying to get a small record label together. That way I'm in control of the process and I can rent out my services to make a little extra cash for the cause.

With OS 9 I know there was an app that allowed you to record mouse actions to set a script to run later, like a souped up Apple Script. You could build a cheap mac, powerful enough to burn CDs, make this script to auto copy any cd you insert, and run it a couple of times to make sure it works then just unplug the monitor/keyboard/mouse and use it as a headless unit for 1:1 duplication.

Man, multiple duplicators would be hard with a computer. I think building a dedicated logic board is the best idea. You could build a type of signal duplicator that takes the output data from the IDE bus and mirrors it to the other drives. The problem is that the drives will want to talk back to the CPU reporting their ready for the next piece of data and all the drives are bound to differ in timing by seconds or fractions thereof, enough to confuse the hell out of a cpu that's already sent or is sending the requested data. You'd have some incredible engineering ahead of you.

I bet there's some open source circuit/logic board site where people are working on this same problem. I'll check around.

That sounds great. The only problem would be my lack of ability to solder or read a circut diagram...so don't kill yourself trying to get that info. I guess this is turning out to be quite a project. I was just trying to find a way around spending $400-$600 for a duplicator.

Well, if you bought many (4-8) of those boxes and populated them with cheap second hand drives you could create an exponential although slow and cumbersome dublication suite.

You're cd duplication would work something like cell division. You'd get a lot of copies but it would require someone to run the suite.

Drive A copies the original giving you two copies. Drives A and B copies those to form 4 copies total. Put them all into drives A, B, C, D and you get 8 copies. With relatively fast drives you could get some real results.

However buying the empty boxes and the drives would probably push you close to the price of a real duplicator.

I think that programs like nero will allow you to burn to multiple identical drives at once.

So you buy a fast ide controler and stick four drives on that and another couple on the motherboard bus and then tell nero to burn to all of them at once. Isn't that how it works?

(I have never tried it but thats what I thought how nero's multiple burning worked).

Nero does support multiple drives(4). Check out FAQ #15.

http://www.nero.com/us/632173759380310.html#15

So it can be done. With more money up to 7 drives. You could populate a mid to low range computer with cheap drives and run nero on it. Set up two computers next to each other with 1 CD-ROM and 4 CD-RW each (you'd need additional IDE ports through PCI) and you got a nice set up. You could produce about 16 CDs an hour.

Alright so Nero is a software solution. That's good. But the $200+ price tag is a bit high...but still cheaper than a stand alone duplicator. That's the right direction. Does Linux have an option?

Get yourself one of the Mac motherboards that has both SCSI and IDE - anything from a 630 through the 54/55/64/6500 series to a Beige G3 - and the appropriate power supply, which can be an ATX for the beige. That way you can have one IDE HD for a boot volume, and seven SCSI CD drives. The beige will let you add three additional IDE/ATA CD drives for a total of ten. Find a suitable tower, hack up, write an Applescript to autocopy the CD to all drives when inserted. If you use only drives that are supported natively on the Mac OS, you won't need Nero. If you use a beige, you can use OS X. If you're feeling brave, try one of the Unixes.

Can anyone refer me to affordable scsi cd burners anywhere online? Preferably wholesale.!

Thanks
Willie Lee
2 Sev Entertainment

External SCSI ports on PCI PowerMacs aren't wonderful. SCSI 2? 10MBps spread over seven devices? That doesn't sound like a fast or reliable solution to me. [Note: My understanding of CD burning software is that it is not "multicast" and talks to each burner individually.]