Can you burn CD/DVD to multiple drives at once?

[mindbend]

I've been thinking of buying a dedicated CD/DVD burning tower since I keep getting requests from clients to bang out a couple of hundred discs at a time.

However, I can't get the pricing to the point where it's really worth the trouble, given the slim margins and the fact that clients can just go to discmakers and get very reasonable low quantity runs.

Anyway, I was wondering if there was a way to use Toast or other software to burn to a stack of external firewire drives all at once. The point being to save money in up front investment costs by just buying a few FW burners instead of a dedicated burning tower.

I know you can use Toast to burn to another network burner, but only one at a time AFAICT.

ANy thoughts?

[scruffy]

Someone built a Lego mindstorms robot to change out CDs as they were burned...

Couldn't find a link to that, but here's a more handbuild one.
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/changer.html

Does this answer your question? No, but I hope you find it's amusing

[bobw]

From Roxio (Toast)

Roxio Knowledge Base Article

ET6000040

How to Multiple Recorders at once

The information in this article applies to:
Toast 6 Titanium
Applicable Operating Systems:
Mac OS X

Issue:

How to: Multiple Recorders at once

Resolution:

There are several steps to this process:

1) Duplicate the Toast Application. If you are in the finder you can choose the

Duplicate option from the file menu. If you have more then 2 recorders, you will need

a duplicate copy of Toast for Each recorder.

2) Launch each copy of the Toast application. If you launch a copy of Toast while
a recorder is already burning a disk, it is likely this burn will fail and
your disk will be ruined, so it is critical to launch each copy of Toast before
beginning any burning.

3) In each Toast window, Select the recorder you want, by initiating a bus scan,
which can be done by clicking on the recorder name at the bottom of the window.

4) Add your data to each layout and begin burning.

Note: The only limitation here is the speed of the drive where the data is coming
from. For example it is likely that if you use an audio CD as a source for several copies at once, you will encounter a buffer under-run (unless your recorder supports buffer under-run protection).

You can also use the ToastAnywhere™ features In Toast 6 Titanium to share
recorders across the network or the Internet. While you are recording to a network recorder, the local recorder connected to your computer will be available to make additional recordings.

[Tetano]

Bob, do you know if this latest thing can detect a recorder on a LAN connected PC?

[bobw]

Toast Anywhere is supposed to work over a network. Go to http://www.roxio.com and do some looking.

[Tetano]

from what I can find it just works with other macs...

[bobw]

Yes, it only shares with other Toast users.