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[Thomas W. Bethel]

Normally I like to work with Disc Makers. They have really nice people working there and produce a very nice product. I sent them a DDP of a project on Monday and somehow some of the files "disappeared" from the down load location. I resent the files and they too disappeared. The last time I sent a Master CD to them they lost the CD. I guess they are just getting too big and have too many jobs going at one time. They also asked me to .ZIP the audio files from the DDP but I have had problems in the past with doing that so I sent them uncompressed.

Anyone else have similar "stories"?

[Allen Corneau]

About 10-15% of my clients use DM, and I've been using their DDP upload service for several jobs now.

I always make the DDP, run the MD-5 checksum (automatically included via Sadie), zip the file and then send it. No problems so far.

Not sure why you wouldn't zip the file, Thomas, it's kind of a no-brainer.

[John Scrip - MASSIVE Mastering]

ZIP'd DDP's to DM often -- Never had an issue.

[Laarsų]

No need to trip.   Please, just do the .zip.   Don't give me no lip, Sri.   Ask for Brian Lipski.   

Brian Lipski
The SoundLAB@Disc Makers
1-800-468-9353




-Laarsų

[Cass Anawaty]

ZIP'd DDP's to DM often -- Never had an issue.

Same here. 

[rossn]

ZIP'd DDP's to DM often -- Never had an issue.

same

[Jerry Tubb]

We have a number of clients coming in for sessions that have already decided to use D*sc M*kers or Oasis. They both have good packaged products. The "name brands" of CD/DVD replication, I'm glad they're there as a standard of measure.

We always tell our clients about our local and regional CD/DVD replicators, like these guys:

http://www.anyandallmedia.com/who_we_are.html

Great people, friendly service, and they're musicians as well.

JT

[jdg]

pretty sure oasis just brokers to DM

[Thomas W. Bethel]

I think Disc Makers bought Oasis a couple of years ago.

[Thomas W. Bethel]

I was told by my mentor NEVER to .ZIP an audio file. Is that no longer true? He said zipping an audio file can lead to unrecoverable errors at the other end.

I would be interested in knowing what the real truth is.

[Allen Corneau]

I was told by my mentor NEVER to .ZIP an audio file. Is that no longer true? He said zipping an audio file can lead to unrecoverable errors at the other end.

I don't know if this the case with your mentor's thinking, but I've come across many people who confuse data compression (Zip/StuffIt/etc.) with audio format compression (MP3/AAC/etc.).

I could see that if he thought that "Zipping" was reducing it down to an MP3 then he would be correct in his recommendation.

To be clear, zipping a file (audio or otherwise) won't damage the files in any way. If something becomes corrupted along the transmission process then the un-zipping will fail and you'll know something has gone wrong.

[Ruairi O Flaherty]

What Allen said.  A zipped file is more robust than an unzipped file in that if there's an error it will fail to open.  I've had experiences in the distant past of sending unzipped audio files that opened at the other end with audio errors.  Add in the MD5 checksum for a belt and braces approach.

[blip01]

Normally I like to work with Disc Makers. They have really nice people working there and produce a very nice product. I sent them a DDP of a project on Monday and somehow some of the files "disappeared" from the down load location. I resent the files and they too disappeared. The last time I sent a Master CD to them they lost the CD. I guess they are just getting too big and have too many jobs going at one time. They also asked me to .ZIP the audio files from the DDP but I have had problems in the past with doing that so I sent them uncompressed.

Anyone else have similar "stories"?

Hi Thomas, sorry for the hiccups with your uploads. Unfortunately it does happen from time to time that some files do not make it through during the upload process. It's hard to say the exact cause. It could be your ISP, something along the route the data is traveling, our ISP, or our servers getting hit with traffic at that particular time. I am confident in saying that "most" of the time uploads are successful though. For the year we're in the neighborhood of 2000 DDPs uploaded to us by studios/engineers. I do realize me saying that doesn't make your particular situation any less frustrating.

As far as zipping/stuffing the DDP file set we actually do recommend that for DDPs. The "What is this?" link on our upload page takes you to an FAQ where we mention that.

It has already been mentioned, zipping is an extra layer of security. Typically if the zipped folder opens on our end successfully we can be reasonably certain that the data inside is fine. We do occasionally receive a zip that won't open for us, but it's pretty rare.

A checksum, either a CRC32 or MD5, of the entire zip folder, or one for each individual file really makes it a 100% secure process. Myself or one of the other two engineers who handle uploads for DM(Doug or Eric for the record!) verify every checksum if present. If the checksum fails for one of the files we will reject that file set and request a new upload.

And as Laarsų mentioned, I'm pretty accessible. If you're having any audio/upload issues at Disc Makers feel free to call me and I will do whatever I can to help.

I may put this on my biz cards:

No need to trip.   Please, just do the .zip.   Don't give me no lip, Sri.   Ask for Brian Lipski.   

Brian Lipski
The SoundLAB@Disc Makers
1-800-468-9353

 

[Thomas W. Bethel]

Hi Thomas, sorry for the hiccups with your uploads. Unfortunately it does happen from time to time that some files do not make it through during the upload process. It's hard to say the exact cause. It could be your ISP, something along the route the data is traveling, our ISP, or our servers getting hit with traffic at that particular time. I am confident in saying that "most" of the time uploads are successful though. For the year we're in the neighborhood of 2000 DDPs uploaded to us by studios/engineers. I do realize me saying that doesn't make your particular situation any less frustrating.

As far as zipping/stuffing the DDP file set we actually do recommend that for DDPs. The "What is this?" link on our upload page takes you to an FAQ where we mention that.

It has already been mentioned, zipping is an extra layer of security. Typically if the zipped folder opens on our end successfully we can be reasonably certain that the data inside is fine. We do occasionally receive a zip that won't open for us, but it's pretty rare.

A checksum, either a CRC32 or MD5, of the entire zip folder, or one for each individual file really makes it a 100% secure process. Myself or one of the other two engineers who handle uploads for DM(Doug or Eric for the record!) verify every checksum if present. If the checksum fails for one of the files we will reject that file set and request a new upload.

And as Laarsų mentioned, I'm pretty accessible. If you're having any audio/upload issues at Disc Makers feel free to call me and I will do whatever I can to help.

I may put this on my biz cards:

No need to trip.   Please, just do the .zip.   Don't give me no lip, Sri.   Ask for Brian Lipski.   

Brian Lipski
The SoundLAB@Disc Makers
1-800-468-9353

Thanks Brian...

I have been talking to Tom Barrett of your company and he has been very helpful. Great team...Keep up the good work and I will .ZIP all my files from now on.

[Treelady]

  A zipped file is more robust than an unzipped file in that if there's an error it will fail to open. 

+1

[gospelmastering]

I was told by my mentor NEVER to .ZIP an audio file. Is that no longer true? He said zipping an audio file can lead to unrecoverable errors at the other end.

I would be interested in knowing what the real truth is.

As pointed out by the others Zipping and audio compressing are two different concepts. Zipping is lossless so there is really no harm done.  The main reason for zipping is, as Ruairi O Flaherty pointed out, is to safeguard the upload is ok.  If the zipped file can be un-zipped then it's 100% sure that the upload was successful.  Otherwise the builtin checksum of the zipping program will complain.

Another main reason for zipping is the so-called Binary vs ASCII issue.  Without zipping some FTP program will use the ASCII mode to upload which is meant for simple text.  By zipping most FTP program know it should be transferred by binary mode.  With ASCII mode even with 100% successful upload the resultant files are quite different from the original files.

A lot of our clients use DM too.  But we prefer a local vendor here in Bay Area called New Cyberian, http://www.newcyberian.com.  Their digipak quality is way better than DM in my humble opinion.  DM is ok, but simply not the best and is far from being the de facto standard.  I'd like to encourage DM to improve its customer services because every time I called I had to repeat the story and was never able to talk to the same person. 

[mastermind]

I agree that zip'ing a file (or files - as in the case of a DDP file set) make the transfer more robust.

Strangely, when uploading Eric Benet's last master to Warner, they were very specific that if you uploaded zip'd DDP file sets, that they needed to be zipped with NO data compression. Apparently there is a way to do this, although I never investigated.  In any case, they refused my zip'd (and data compressed) files (they compare file size pre and post extration to see if it was data compressed). Since I didn't want to take the time to figure out how to zip with no actual data compression, I just uploaded the DDP files as-is.... no zip'ing.

I received such a stern response form them in regards to this, I felt it necessary to investigate the matter, so I zip'd some DDP's, on both Macs and PCs, up-zip-ing on different computers and then re-importing into Wavelab... in each and ever instance I got the files to null.... I couldn't get then to not null.... so my impression of the data compression in a zip file is that it is solid.

I also upload to Discmakers a lot....   never a problem.

t