Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

Still in Austin, still a-bloggin’ it.

Okay, this is WAY cool: Mixonic is an online CD duplication service that specializes in extremely small quantities. Basically, you upload your MP3s to their server (they’re deleted after 30 days) and create a track list. Then you design your CD label online with their way-cool CD Designer application, which is basically a low-level, Web-based Photoshop-like tool. You can upload images and position them on the CD template along with text. Then you save the design and track list and order the quantity you want. You can order as few as one or two or as many as a thousand. The CDs come to you with real full-color label, not stickers. What a fantastic idea.

Some constructive criticism: the CD designer, however cool, is way too complicated to understand. Break that baby up into framesets so the label layout can be refreshed without reloading the whole page. There’s not enough online help available, what little there is in in the form of a general FAQ page that takes you away from your design. Maybe consider using Flash for the label preview window, so text and images come out clean and scale better. Overall, the whole site needs UI help; I was able to figure out how to use it, but I’m a Web guy and I recognize the metaphors. I fear the occasional web-surfing musician will become frustrated and go elsewhere, which is a big potential problem for something that obviously is meant to hook you with a cool service (you can save your CD configurations and reorder them as neccessary, awesome). And the only way to find pricing info was through the home page.

But there’s a huge potential demand for this type of service. An artist can press ten CDs through Mixonic as a trial run without committing to a ridiculous quantity which may well end up sitting in the basement. (I mean, really, who’s going to sell 1000 CDs out of the gate? I’m still lugging around about 100 copies of my first-ever CD and that was eight years ago). And the fact that you can upload MP3s and basically do everything via a computer makes it super-easy to dash off an order for 20 discs to sell at a last-minute gig.