Are you in the market for a small CD/DVD duplicator? If so check out the Forte series from Disc Makers.
There are a few different models available. We started off with the smallest unit, simply called the Forte. Also available are the Forte2, Forte3, Forte5 and Forte8. The number at the end signifies the number of CD/DVD drives installed in the unit.
We can say it’s a great device if you need to make small runs of CD or DVD’s. It’s very simple to use. It’s a stand alone device that does not require a computer. The unit has an internal disk drive allowing you to your store master copies on the disk for future burning. You can also load a master CD and copy directly from that CD bypassing the internal disk drive.
We just received our Forte CD duplicator yesteray. Worked flawlessly right out of the box. We burned 60 CD’s in a few hours. We added the LightScribe option to our unit so we could also burn labels directly on the CD’s.
One small complaint. The included Quickstart guide nor the complete User Guide, shipped on a separate CD, had any information about how to use the labeling feature. After some digging around on the Disc Makers web site we found a manual from a different model that had enough information to get us going.
If you have used a Lightscribe drive in the past you know that you generally use some type of graphic design package to do your label layout and then burn that onto the CD. We were doing that with either the free Lightscribe software or with a package we have from Nero.
In the case of the Disc Makers Forte series, you need to load a label package onto the internal disk drive which is then used to burn the label. The biggest challenge we had was that the Nero package was not able to create the *.lsi files needed. As luck would have it the label that we wanted to use was done in Nero and incompatible with the Forte. So here’s the trick:
From Nero, print the CD label using the print option, not the “burn to CD” option. Rather than go directly to a printer we went to CutePDF, which allowed us to save the image into a PDF file. From there you can open the PDF with GIMP, a graphic editing tool, and save it as a JPEG file. Next, go to the Lightscribe softare that ships with the Forte unit. Open the template for a CD with no background. From there you can import the JPEG file and now save the required *.lsi file.
Burn the *.lsi file onto a CD. From that CD the Forte will load the *.lsi file onto the internal disk drive where it will be available for labeling all the CD’s in your project.
The main lesson learned – All future labels will be done using the included Lightscribe package, which can create the needed *.lsi files. This would have been a non-issue had we not already had a label done in the non-compatible Nero format.
