Cool hardware

Primera Bravo CD Burner and Label Printer

Rating:

By Joel Shore

August 4, 2003

Hey kids! Starting a band? Already in a band? Even better!

It’s time you take those shred guitar perfor-mances and publish your own album. Right? The big problem is, you gotta burn CDs one at a time in your computer, print labels on the old inkjet and stick them on—hoping you’ll get them straight. Talk about a pain in the butt. Wanna make 50 copies? You’ll be there all weekend, and you might even miss the one gig where a record-label scout just happens to be in the audience. That’s no way to get dangerously happy.

Well, here’s a way better idea. Check out the Primera Bravo combination CD burner and label printer. Yep, believe it or not, you can actually do both at the same time. Even better, you can load a stack of 25 blank CDs, push a button and forget about it. You’ll have more time to crank the feedback and blast the bass.

In case you’re not up on the latest music news, Clear Channel, owner of dozens of concert venues around the country, is recording rock concerts and then selling discs of that very performance to concertgoers as they head out to the parking lot. So why not do the same thing with your band? Since you’re already mixing and recording onto that multitrack, digital, hard-disk-based mini-recording studio, you can add a Bravo system and, poof—sell your own concert CDs on the spot. That’ll pay for that gorgeous Gibson or Rickenbacker guitar you’ve been dying for!

Bravo prints your label designs at high resolution on the printable surface of special CDs. You can forget about printing paper labels and trying to adhere them centered on the disc.

USB and FireWire. Bravo is two separate products combined into a single unit. There’s a high-speed CD burner (52x) or a DVD burner, depending on which model you choose. And there’s also a high-resolution, 2400 dot-per-inch inkjet printer, not really any different from what you might already have sitting on your desk. Since it burns one disc while simultaneously printing the label on another, the Bravo requires two cable connections to your PC or Macintosh. The IEEE 1394 FireWire connection handles the large amount of data being burned onto the disc while the USB connection manages the much smaller data stream being sent to the printer.

Hooking up the Bravo is easy. You connect the USB and FireWire cables to your PC or Mac and plug in the power. If your PC doesn’t have a FireWire port (Macs all do), you’ll have to buy an expansion card to add that capability. Take a trip to the local mega-consumer-electronics store (Fry’s, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.) and pick one up. Next, you install the software. That includes drivers needed to make the darn thing run, and the label-design application.

We checked out the PC version of the label software, called SureThing. Plenty of templates are included, so it doesn’t matter if you’re not a great artist. It didn’t take long to get the hang of it. SureThing isn’t nearly as powerful as Adobe Photoshop, but for everyone except those with very exotic design requirements, SureThing is a sure thing. For the background image on our disc, we used a photo of the band whose music we were burning.

From initial set-up to full operation, Bravo was simple to use. You install the black and tricolor (cyan, magenta, yellow) ink cartridges just like any inkjet printer you already have. The CD/DVD burning software from Veritas allows virtually any digital information to be duplicated. Keep it legal.

If there’s more than 25 people in your band’s fan club, adding the kiosk option to the Bravo lets you can pump out up to 50 burned and printed CDs or DVDs in a single batch. You’ll wind up saving hours of time, and that’ll help the Bravo pay for itself pretty fast.

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Fun to watch. Watching the Bravo do its thing is a whole lot more fun than watching reality TV. Really. Once your label design is finished, and you’ve followed the instructions for creating the data to be placed on the discs, you’re ready to rock.

First, a robotic arm swings to the right side of the unit and picks up a blank disc. Next, it swings to the center, where the disc burner is located. The drawer opens and the disc is gently lowered into position. About three minutes later (for CDs, longer for DVDs), the drawer opens, the disc is picked up, and it’s moved to the printing station. While the label is printing, the arm gets another disc for burning. The great thing is that the Bravo can burn one disc at the same time it’s printing the label on another. How cool is that?

We listened to a disc that we burned. The music wasn’t exactly what we usually listen to, but it was burned perfectly nonetheless. More important, the printed label was spectacular. Colors were bright and vibrant. Blacks were rich and dark. That’s because the discs are coated with an opaque white surface designed for inkjet printing, kind of like applying a coat of primer before painting the finish coat on your house. And printing at 2400 dots per inch is as good as it gets. You’ll be thrilled with the results. You can even make your disc labels shimmer: you can buy discs with a lustrous silver-colored printable surface.

We also really liked the idea of getting rid of those miserable paper labels. Unless you buy the expensive high-gloss labels, the images always look washed out. And then you have to peel the label, and hope that you’ll have it properly centered when you stick it onto the disc. Printing directly on the disc looks light years brighter, and since there’s no paper that can be peeled off, the results are truly professional.

Bravo has a capacity of 25 discs. Like the man says, just set it and forget it. If 25 isn’t enough, you can buy an add-on “kiosk” that doubles the capacity to 50 discs. Load it and go to lunch. And if you insist on creating those odd-ball business-card shaped discs, you can buy an add-on option for that, too. But I’d never stick one of those strange discs in my PC. I’m afraid it might never come back out.

Bravo gives you the same disc burning and printing technology used by professional service bureaus, but at a fraction of the cost. Of course, you’re not pumping out discs by the thousands. If you distribute your own software, have an album or video, or any other legitimate reason to create lots of copies of the same disk, the Bravo Disc Publisher from Primera Technology is a must have. <