Cheaper J-Cards With Faster Turnaround Using Automated Print

Do you want even more affordable printed J-cards, faster to your door, without having to skimp on quality? Unbelievably, Duplication.ca can provide that for you! Introducing our Automated Print products:

Rancid's "Tomorrow Never Comes" cassette J-card

The Automated Print items work similarly to the standard online shop system, but instead the artwork is uploaded through our Online Designer. This allows you to design your artwork in-browser without the use for an expensive graphic design suite, or simply drag ‘n drop your pre-existing artwork into the Online Designer. After checkout your artwork is automatically sent to the printer queue, with zero hassle in between! Not only does this mean your J-cards will be printed, scored, and shipped quicker, but it also saves pre-press time on our end. We pass those savings on to you, making the J-cards even cheaper than our regular print pricing.

J-card creasing machine

Using the online designer is remarkably simple, you can review the guide we wrote up a couple of weeks ago. Just remember to extended the artwork past the template lines, and to double-check your work as to ensure your artwork appears as intended! You will need to approve your artwork once more after checkout, which serves as a final opportunity for a quick inspection.

All these benefits without having to compromise on quality! The J-cards are professionally printed using Cougar™ Super Smooth stock— 80lb smooth cover at 216 GSM. Double-sided printing is included in the price, with bright and vibrant colours on durable paper.

Use Your Online Shop Address Book on the Duplication Calculators

We have integrated the online shop address book into our popular duplication calculators! Now, when you’re entering a duplication or pressing order, sign in to get access to your address book. Here’s a few pictures showing how it works. First, sign in or register:

When you’re on the 2nd step, your addresses will be pulled from the online shop. You can also click on View Address Book where you can maintain your addresses.

When you’re looking at your account in the online shop, there’s a tab to view your duplication orders under Quotes Orders. Only new orders will show up here.

Currently, only 1 shipping address can be chosen per order.

UV Print On Cassette

Full body print

UV print has totally revolutionized how you can design your cassette releases. You no longer need to limit yourself to one or two colours, you have the entire CMYK spectrum to choose from when designing your masterpiece. Even better, with Full Body UV print you can design artwork on the raised edges and bottom hub area of the cassette shell, doing away with the constraints found in sticker labels and pad print! Our template includes knockout layers for the hubs and window, that way ink will not seep inside of the shell.

Ordering Full Body Print is easy! Just select it from the ‘Label type’ dropdown menu. You have a choice between single sided or double sided artwork, just like with pad print. We’ve also added UV print as an item in our online shop to add to your blank tapes!

Stained glass and reverse UV print

What makes UV print pop on cassette is the white base coating applied before your artwork, which stops the ink from being absorbed by the plastic shell, especially with darker shell colours. However, when you don’t apply the white base, you instead get a semi-transparent effect, wherein you can see the artwork but light can still shine through with transparent shells – very similar to stained glass!

With transparent shells you can sidestep the white base coating to also achieve a visible reverse print. Here’s an example by Monster Piece, released by Sly Vinyl Records, where you can see the reverse image of the Side B artwork by looking through Side A. This gives a sense of perspective and distance, as if the moon is in the background and the howling werewolf in the foreground. The B-side will show the artwork in its correct orientation as provided by the artist.

Omitting the white base coating for a stained glass effect or reverse print is available by request! Just add UV Full Body print to your cassette order and let us know your desired effect in the ‘notes’ section of your order.

📸 courtesy of Sly Vinyl Records

Order cassette duplication with UV print

VHS is Back and Better Than Ever!

VHS is Back and Better Than Ever!

Who can forget the feeling of walking through the video store, strolling from aisle to aisle, trying to find the perfect VHS tape to watch that night? Sure, streaming services offer us thousands of options, but gone is the ritual of popping in a physically tactile VHS, an object which gives a film respect and purpose not unlike what an audio cassette or vinyl does for music. At Duplication.ca you can get your film or video project duplicated on VHS with full packaging, thus giving your work the attention it deserves!

Modern VHS releases are a wonderful medium because they aren’t just limited to feature-length releases, but a whole gamut of audio/visual projects. Music video compilations, short films, vaporwave visuals, live gigs, just to name a few. As a filmmaker or a musician you can sell your work online or at the merch table at a screening or performance, rather than navigate the film festival or streaming distribution circuit.

Not only do our dubbed VHS tapes look excellent, our print and packaging are of superb quality. Printed cardboard sleeves are in full colour CMYK with your choice of digital or offset press. The sleeves snuggly fit the video cassette without being too tight or loose. You can even add glossy AQ coating for an additional fee if you want it to feel silky smooth and shine against the light.

Order VHS duplication with printed cardboard sleeves

 

Another packaging option are our clear plastic library cases, which contain an overlay film so you can add a printed wraparound sheet for artwork. Since the cases are clear, you can even request double-sided printing for extra artwork or notes! Sticker face labels and spine labels can be added to both the library cases and printed cardboard sleeves.

Order VHS duplication in clear library cases

Printed VHS sticker labels

Do you have the equipment to duplicate your own VHS tapes? Then we have everything you need to DIY analog style! We received a restock of blank VHS tapes, with a wide variety of lengths and brands to fit your needs, including some superb quality S-VHS tapes and economy one-pass tapes. You can also find blank labelslibrary cases, and custom-printed products in the online store.

View all our VHS products and services in the online store

Get audio duplication on our pre-loaded blank tapes!

Get audio duplication on our pre-loaded blank tapes!

We have great news for those who want high-quality cassette duplication while maintaining a cheap bottom line. You can now order cassette duplication with our selection of surplus pre-loaded tapes!

Pre-loaded tapes are blank cassettes which already have a certain length of audio tape loaded. These are often the result of human error on our part— every now and then when we duplicate cassettes we’ll load a batch of cassettes to the wrong length. However, our mistake becomes your bounty, since that means we can throw these tapes in the shop at a discounted price!

This is also your chance to grab some of our discontinued shell colours, like Forest Green. We have a vast selection of type-I pre-loaded cassettes, and even some long lost type-II high bias pre-loaded cassettes!

Now you no longer have to duplicate these cassettes from home, we can take care of the recording process for you. We use our real-time duplication process which allows for a frequency range of 20Hz to 20kHz. Simply add the duplication product during checkout, along with your desired pre-loaded cassettes. You’ll receive a link to upload your audio after checkout. If you ordered pre-loaded tapes marked “c20”, that would mean they’re 10 minutes in length per side.

Click here to add audio duplication to your pre-loaded cassette order

Please keep in mind that pre-loaded cassettes consist of old unused clearance stock, and thus some cassettes may have scratches or scuffs. This is considered clearance stock which is sold as-is and are final sale.

If you want custom-length duplicated cassettes, then our classic order page is the way to go. You can add full printing and packaging to your order, or simply request bulk tapes! This page will give you a ton of options so you can choose your audio tape type, duplication speed, shell colour, and much more.

Order cassette duplication

Cassette slipcase loading variations explained

Our printed slipcases are an excellent packaging method for box sets and multi-cassette releases. Cassettes fit snuggly inside, safe from accidentally slipping out when pulling the slipcase off the shelf. We have developed template variations for each slipcase, one in which the cassette is removed from the left of the slipcase and one from the right. Here’s a breakdown:

Left Loading

Portugal the Man cassette by Duplication.ca

This design is the one most often seen with multi-book slipcases. When looking at the slipcase over, the cassettes are removed from the left side. This way the front of the J-Card is seen immediately.

Right Loading

Christtt cassettes by Duplication.ca

With ‘right loading’ slipcases, everything is basically the opposite. When looking at the front slipcase cover the cassettes will be removed from the right-hand spine area. When you remove the closest cassette you will see the back of the top cassette. This design works best when paired with striking pad print or laser engraving designs on the tapes!

Need some more clarification? Check out this video for a visual explanation!

Our templates include left-loading and right-loading variations. They can be downloaded here.

Printed slipcases are available for purchase on our online store. You can also order cassette duplication and request to add slipcases in the ‘Notes’ section, we’ll adjust the order quote for you!

Duplication.ca Gift Certificates

Artists with particular tastes can be difficult to shop for. Who can tell tell what they want, what they already have, and what they don’t have? This year you can play it safe with our Duplication.ca gift cards. These digital gift certificates allow your recipient to use the freedom of their imagination and choose what they need for their next album release or artistic endeavour!

Click here to order gift certificates!

Maybe they’ll take the opportunity to print heavy duty 12″ jackets for their next single drop? Or perhaps it’s their chance to splurge on professional quality CD replication? If they’re the DIY-type they can stock up on our brand new cassette shells!

Your gift certificate can be used at checkout in the online store. If you’d like to use it with our duplication services you will need to contact us before payment so we can manually deduct the gift certificate amount.

A Step-By-Step Guide to Cassette Duplication

The cassette duplication calculator is an incredibly handy order form that allows you to customize your cassette packages while updating you on the price in real-time. However, as our option list grows, we understand newcomers may feel the calculator is a bit overwhelming. We’re always here to help, but this step-by-step guide should answer any questions you may have!

A Step-By-Step Guide to the Cassette Duplication Order Form

Duplication Speed

The duplication speed determines the recording quality of your cassette. Real-time is recorded at, well, real-time speed with your master. This is the higher quality option, with a frequency range of 20Hz to 20kHz. Even so, high-speed duplication sounds wonderful, capable of audio from 20Hz to 17kHz.

Length Per Side

Length per side is for you to let us know the length of the longest side of your master. So that is to say that if your sequence of tracks has a total length of 14:28 for side A, and 15:30 for side B, you’d round up to 16 minutes for the length per side.

But don’t fret, we won’t be adding 30 seconds of silence to Side B, we’ll actually be loading the cassette exactly to the length of your master (with a few additional seconds of lead-in time to avoid cutoffs.)

Copy

Let us know if there’s different audio on each side of the tape, audio on side A only, or if both sides have identical audio.

Tape Type

Like ‘Duplication Speed’, the tape type determines the quality of your audio. Our standard is super-ferro normal bias, which has excellent volume and fidelity. However, if you want even crisper bass and louder volume, our high-bias Maxell XLII-S is the choice for audiophiles. BASF 120 is needed for cassettes that are 120 minutes or longer in total length. Maxell XLII-S and BASF 120 are only available with real-time duplication.

Cassette Colour

Now we’re getting to the fun parts. We have dozens of shell colours for you to choose from, so you’re faced with the decision on which colour suits your music and artwork best. This list is divided into five sections: opaque, metallic foil, tinted and transparent, glitter shells, and chrome cassettes to pair with Maxell XLII-S tape.

If you want to quickly run through all our cassette shell options, pull up the cassette selection guide to see what we currently have in stock!

Packaging

Here you can choose the type and colour of your cassette case. We have tons of Norelco cassette case colours in stock, so you can match them with your cassette shell colour if you so desire. We can also add special packaging to your Norelco cases, such as laser engraving designs to the case, or an outer O-Card which wraps around the cassette case, giving you an extra layer of artwork.

If you’re searching for deluxe packages, check out our cassette vinyl albums. They open like an audio book with enough additional space for a booklet, pins, or patches.

Cover Type

Here is where you’ll choose the format for your printed artwork. JP0 J-cards are standard three panels (front, spine, back), and you can add additional panels for liner notes, lyrics, or artwork. You may also choose between single or double-sided printing.

You can also choose your printed trapsheet artwork for cassette vinyl albums. 4/0 refers to single-sided printing, and 4/4 would be double-sided printing, though you’d want to combine the 4/4 trapsheets with our transparent cassette vinyl albums for the sake of visibility. You can add panel foldovers as inserts for your trapsheets as well.

Label Type

Now we’re at the customization stage! The label type is how you’d like to decorate the cassette itself. Paper labels are printed stickers that we place on the cassette, whereas pad print is an ink design that we stamp directly to the cassette and cannot be peeled off. Finally, laser etching is a laser-created engraving to the face of the cassette, permanently carving in your design. You can choose to have these label types on either one side or both sides of the cassette.

When you choose your label type you will receive a new set of options. Printed labels will ask you which label shape you’d like. We wrote a blog post that will give you visual examples of each label, so take a look before deciding!

Pad print will ask you which colour you’d like. Pad print is one colour only, though by special request we can print up to two colours on the cassette. ‘Pad print type’ depends on the size of your artwork. For simple text and a small logo choose ‘standard design’, but for halftone artwork, large solid areas, or extended print areas, choose ‘floods or halftones’. Finally, ‘single or double hit’ depends on how vibrant you’d like your pad print. If you’re printing a black image on a white shell, single hit will do. However, if you’re printing a light colour on a dark shell (such as yellow ink on a black cassette), we highly recommend double hit.

Download Codes

Download codes are absolutely essential for when you want the benefits and tangibility of physical media and not lose the convenience of digital files. We can host the album for you (max 250MB) and print digital download codes. Alternatively, you can supply us with codes to print if you have your own hosting, or even a list of Bandcamp download codes!

Obi-Strips

Obi-strips follow the Japanese aesthetic of album packaging, adding a printed strip of artwork and text to your case. Traditionally these included album descriptions and prices, but it’s your design, you do whatever you want with it! Choose between vertical or horizontal obi-strip orientations.

Test Tape

We sent you a newsletter about test tapes just last week, but to summarize, if you want to approve the audio quality of your cassette before mass production then you can add a test tape to your order. Keep in mind that it does not include printing and packaging, and it adds another 1 to 2 weeks to your order turntime.

Overwrap

If you want your cassette to arrive in mint condition, or if you’re planning on selling them in-store, we suggest adding overwrap to your order. An alternative option is our resealable clear bags which have an adhesive strip for multi-use and keeping your cassette immaculate.

Rush

We recently reinstated rush options! Our turntime is currently 5 to 8 weeks, but if you need your album with the quickness you can turn your quote into a rush order. Please note rush orders are measured in business days.

Quantity

This one’s easy. How many copies do you want?

UPS Shipping Option

UPS Standard Shipping is the default shipping method to the United States and Canada! If you need your album immediately, we’d recommend the 2-day or overnight shipping options.

UPS Signature Delivery

We highly recommend choosing this option. This will ensure that your package arrives not just to your door, but to your hands. That way no mail carrier will leave it on your front porch for it to be stolen, or hand it over to negligent neighbours who immediately leave for vacation.

And that’s it!

Oh my God, did you read all of that? Well if you did, by now you surely know your way around our cassette duplication order form. All you have to do is ready your audio and artwork for upload (artwork templates here!), and visualize which packaging combination will look best on your merch table and checkout page.

Order cassette duplication today

Get Higher-Resolution Pad Print Using Vector Artwork!

In the past couple of months we began experimenting with creating pad print plates using vector artwork. The results were astounding! Sharper text and images with an even quicker workflow. It’s time we got the word out— send us vector artwork for pad print!

How can you do that? When you’re designing pad print artwork in Photoshop or Illustrator and you’re entering a line of text, don’t rasterize said text, and don’t flatten the file. Turn the text and objects into work paths when using Photoshop, or turn them into outlines in Adobe Illustrator. This way when we print we won’t be using a bitmapped layer with resolution loss. Instead we’ll have sharp lines without the fuzziness you’d find in bitmap text. It will also help us print thinner lines that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, as our new laser engraver has 10x finer resolution, equal in quality to lithograph film.

If you don’t have the graphic design savvy to turn into work paths or outlines, another thing you could do is to keep the text layer as a text layer. That is to say do not rasterize the text, and do not flatten the file. We’ll do our best to turn the text into outlines on our end. Once you see the final results, you’ll be happy we did!

Black Dresses cassette

You can still submit the pad print files the old fashioned way, with rasterized text or bitmapped images. We have always prided ourselves in our excellent pad print quality, but that doesn’t mean we can’t strive for even greater resolution. Just make sure to supply using the proper template based on your cassette shell. Vector artwork should be submitted using PDF, whereas bitmapped resolution can be supplied in PSD, PDF, TIFF, or PNG.

Pad print is available using our cassette duplication quote calculator. This is where you get your fully packaged album on cassette in one simple order. You’ll receive an instant quote on the page, so you can play around with the print and packaging options until you find the perfect package at a great price.

What Are Multisession CDs?

If you’ve ever wanted to expand medium of compact discs to video, photo, or executable programs, then multisession CDs are the way to go. It’s an excellent way of releasing two formats simultaneously on one disc, and we can take care of the authoring!

Ohbliv - Spirit Medicine

What are Multisession CDs?

Multisession CDs, also known as Enhanced CD, contain two different sections. The first is CD-audio, which is the music that plays when you pop the CD into a CD player. This contains the same Red Book audio standards as your typical CD— stereo 16-bit / 44.1kHz audio files.

The second section is a digital folder which can be accessed by reading the CD on a computer. You will see a disc folder that has digital files, such as video, images, or PDFs.

Enhanced CD multisession

Above is an image of how a multisession CD appears in File Explorer. Enhanced CDs will have a + symbol in the icon. Media players such as VLC or iTunes may open automatically when the disc is inserted based on your computer autoplay settings. To view the data in the folder, right click the icon and click Open.

What can you add to a Multisession CD?

That’s up to you! You can add music videos to your enhanced disc, or an all-access backstage pass video showing the band on the road. Many bands choose to add images or PDFs depicting high-resolution artwork and liner notes. The more computer-savvy artist may even consider programming an interactive executable file.

Are there limitations to Multisession CDs?

A CD holds 700MB of data, and there’s a good chance that a chunk of the disc will be taken up by the audio. If there’s not enough space for every file you’d like to include, you may want to consider compressing larger files like videos or image-heavy PDFs.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you want the experience to be friendly to both Windows and Mac users. For example, Windows users won’t be able to open a DMG, and Mac users won’t be able to open an EXE.

Where can I go to get a Multisession master created for me?

That’s where Duplication.ca comes in! For a small authoring fee we can provide multisession mastering with no additional cost per disc. Not only will we create your master disc, but we also do CD pressing, printing, and packaging. You can get your enhanced CD album pressed and shipped to your door in one simple order.

Our CD pressing page gives you an instant quote so you can mix and match options until you’ve built the perfect album package at the right price. Multisession discs are a custom order, so be sure to mention it in the ‘notes’ section so we can send you an updated quote.