CD duplication tower ills

[Duggus]

I've just been handed the media section in our church. We have 2 CD duplicators, one antiquated and currently burning 4 out of 8 at a time. The other is a 3 year old Power Digital tower that burns 10 at a time. 4 of the trays do not open by themselves. I've been told to use a paper clip in the small hole near the tray, and it works to open it, but I'd rather find a fix. Any ideas? I know someone out there has run into this. Thanks.

[tedanderson]

The drives themselves wear out over time and they can be easily replaced as they are no different than the ones in your PC. And CD burners are very cheap being that the industry has gone to multi-format drives where they can do CD's and DVD's.

Having said that, you may not be able to find a CD burner in any store but you might find some B-stock stuff at a local computer show or on the net. Other than that, you might want to take a chance at installing the CD/DVD drives into your duplicator.

My guess is that the controller board inside of the duplicator will allow the new drive to operate as a CD burner ONLY even though it will say "DVD" on the front of it.

[Duggus]

I'm not "techy" enough to change them out, so I guess I put a new machine on the wish list. Thanks for your opinion and evaluation. Since last posting, I've found the affected trays still burn content, but have to be opened with the paper clip. An inconvenience to say he least, but we are a small church and don't have the mass production requirements of larger churches. :0)

[Paris MkVI]

You may also want to get an estimate for a local computer shop to replace the defective drives, and compare that against the price of a new tower.

That way, you do not have to do the tech work, and you may, perhaps, come up with an option that will offer better stewardship of resources.

[prochlea]

Also - you should think about a plan to move away from making as many CD's and move to podcasting. You may find that you only need to make CD's for a select few and most people would be OK playing off the 'net or downloading it to their phone or ipod.