Help a multimedia newbie do a cool birth announcement

January 10, 2008 1:36 PM

What would be the best/easiest way of creating 50-100 copies of a CD Birth Announcement that contains both music and photos? I am not talking about a slide show presentation set to music. The wife and I have chosen, and purchased on CD, fun songs that have the baby's name in the title, that we want people to be able to listen to on their CD/DVD players. We would also like to include some photos of the baby, they could be files on the CD or printed on paper as part of an insert/cover. I have EXPECTANT FATHER BRAIN please help.

I am thinking of getting blank cardboard media sleeves from stumptownprinters.com and either apply a label we print, or some funky rubberstamps to the cover, and some silkscreened blank CDS from 5inch.com. The theory is to burn the CD's, stuff them in a nice custom sleeve, along with a baby photo that has a printed birth announcement on the back as part of the liner notes.

So, how would you do this? What kind of CD's do I want, what software is ready for me to use on windows XP, my Canon inkjet printer, and will music and photo files be too big for a CD? What is the best mailing method and packaging? Give me the expurgated step by step instructions on how you would do this. Bonus points for telling me how to save some time and still make an elegant funky/fun announcement.

We won't have any photos until March when the baby is due, but I would like to have the rest of the package ready to rock and roll in the next 3-4 weeks.

posted by SMELLSLIKEFUN to media & arts (5 comments total)

This sort of CD is known as an enhanced CD and any decent CD burning software should be able to produce one. You want to go for the type known as CD plus or CD extra -- these put the data track after the music making it easier to pay in audio CD players. You can find a tutorial on the subject at Webmonkey. It need not be to complex just the audio and the pictures in the data track, with maybe a basic web page to tie them together.

You can work out the amount of space needed easily enough a CD holds approx 700 Mb of data or 70 minutes of music so 60 minutes of music still leaves you 100Mb of space for pictures.

...and congratulations.
posted by tallus at 1:56 PM on January 10, 2008

Just a quick heads up, this is definitely illegal. Not one to judge, what you do is your business, but frequently I encounter people who have no idea copying and redistributing retail CDs, even in "mixtape" form, is illegal. I might be wary if 50-100 copies are going out to 50-100 different people. Obviously chance of prosecution is low, but there you go.
posted by Phyltre at 1:57 PM on January 10, 2008

Not to mention, sorry to disillusion you... I've gotten a couple of these, one for a wedding, and I never bothered to watch them.
posted by IndigoRain at 9:24 PM on January 10, 2008

If you're running a legit copy of Win XP, then Photostory was pretty much designed with people like you in mind. If you can square the MS legit check on your Windoze install with your conscience, then it's a free piece of software that allows you to combine music, pictures, and text captions with some basic transitions and then output to video format at the end.
posted by unless I'm very much mistaken at 8:18 AM on January 11, 2008

I think Tallus got it right. I don't want it to be multi-media. I just want to send different file types on one disc. We want to send a birth announcement that reflects our happiness and creative nature. We want to send photographs of the baby that can be easily dropped onto relatives computers. I want to send out an eclectic "mixtape" with our baby's name in all the song titles to make people smile. We want it in a fun package that we will enjoy creating without breaking any laws. Hopefully some of the joy will rub off. It's what we do.

Any loopholes for distributing copied music? I don't want my kid to be the literal RIAA Anti- piracy poster child! The intent of this is: Listen to it in the car once, drop a few images of our new "monkey" in your picture file, and toss it.
posted by SMELLSLIKEFUN at 9:43 AM on January 11, 2008