Zé Dos Frangos on Blogs and Sites

Remember that Steve Martin movie called The Jerk? He becomes ecstatic with joy when the new phone book arrives and his name is in it. "I'm somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity - your name in print - that makes people. I'm in print! Things are going to start happening to me now."

That's exactly how I feel today, except, a level down maybe. A couple of blog posts came up and after a little fighting I got the CD Release Party posted on its respective venue websites for Lisbon and Bratislava.

Blogs
A Trompa em Lisboa
Traveling Jenny in Maine
Artless Processes in Washington

Venues
Galeria Zé Dos Bois em Lisboa
4coffee v Bratislave

Amazon.com
Songs To Escape America
Music For Reading
Portugal/Slovakia

Record Stores
AA Records (Europe)
CD Baby (USA)
Rhapsody
Emusic
Napster

Challenges I encountered while trying to get the ZDF CD pressed

The Zé Dos Frangos International CD Release Party is in one month, so I was a little nervous about getting the CD done in time, especially since it's my first time to press a real CD. I mixed and mastered the CD on my Mac and brought the final mixes with me when I moved back to the US two weeks ago. Here are some problems that took a bunch of my time to solve.

Problem 1: SD2 Files
I brought all of the CD tracks with me from Slovakia prepared for burning, but why did I bring them in Sound Designer 2 format? This is the default output format for Waveburner, the program I used for final sequencing. I couldn't open them with iTunes or Quicktime on my PC.

Solution: Borrow Angela's MacBook and convert them to WAV files with iTunes

Problem 2: MP4 files
I wanted to include the video for Feel My Mustafa on the CD, but I needed to play it with a Flash player (SWF).

Solution: Download the free video converter called Super

Problem 3: Burn Audio and Video to the same disc
Some free programs like ImgBurn and InfraRecorder can burn audio and data to the same disc, but I had to burned a lot of test CDs until I realized that they were making what's called a Mixed-Mode CD. In a Mixed-Mode CD the first track is data, which will destroy you if you have the volume up when you press play. The only way to truly separate the audio and data so that the CD player won't read both is to put them in different sessions. In a Mac, this will look like two seperate CDs in the Finder. With Nero 9 I was able to created a disc image of my multi-session disc.

Solution: Download trial version of Nero and use profile CD Extra

Problem 4: Paying $200 for software I'll never use again
I created an Autorun file for my CD using a trial version of AutoRun Pro Enterprise. The output seemed fine, but then the reproduction house called to say that it wouldn't run because I hadn't paid for the AutoRun software!

Solution: Pay $30 for AutoRun Expert and redo the whole thing

P.S. CD Duplication is CD-Rs, CD Replication is with a glass master. Thanks to New Cyberian Systems, Inc. for all of the good info on their page.