Getting ready to produce a short-run of our new Mango fan Django CD (around 200 copies). My recording engineer has used Kunaki for a few of his short-runs and he's been pretty satisfied. What's Kunaki? You can check it out at
http://www.Kunaki.com. But basically, it's a totally automated CD/DVD production company promising quick and reasonably priced short-orders from 1 to as many CDs as you want. If you need more than say 300 copies, there are other services that may offer better prices, but for short-orders, Kunaki seems to fit the bill.
Being a totally automated system, there is very little customer assistance (other than their rather curt and sometimes funny FAQ page). Bottomline: You have full control and responsibility for the entire production process. What you give them is what you get back in your product.
Again, if you are interested, check out their website for more info. Meanwhile, I'm wondering if anyone out there has had experience with Kunaki.
Additionally, I have a question about CD-texting and Gracenote. While Kunaki will allow you to have CD-text on your product, it appears people have been having trouble getting this feature to work. After reading up a bit about CD-texting, I suspect the issue could be due to Kunaki using Red Book CD standards and not all CD-writers with CD-texting capability write to this standard. (In fact, it appears Sony has their own CD-texting standard that is not Red Book and not accepted by Kunaki).
But as I further considered this issue, I began to wonder if I really need CD-texting on our new CD. It seems CD-texting is mostly for CD players with the capability to give a screenshot of the CD info -- such as CD players found in many new cars. A nice feature, but I don't know if it's critical. Your thoughts?
My main concern is that when people buy our CD and want to transfer the tracks to their mp3 player (as via iTunes), they are able to get the song titles, artist, etc. I'd like to avoid the dreaded Track 1, Track 2, etc.
It turns out this issue is an easy fix by simply submitting the CD track info to Gracenote via iTunes. (After loading and labeling tracks, you go to Advanced and click Submit CD Track Names). For more info, check the Gracenote FAQs
http://www.gracenote.com/about/faqs/#upload. Gracenote has worked well for me, usually finding any new CD I'm loading into iTunes. Only snag seems to be when the CD hasn't been submitted to Gracenote for submission.
So, sorry for this long thread, but again my questions are:
Anyone with Kunaki experience?
Is there any major value of having CD-texting vs just Gracenote for identifying tracks?
Thanks in advance for any info, comments, or inputs.
AE