ISO, DDP and other things to know

When you burn your music or cd-rom data onto a blank disc you are actually creating an ISO disc image.

An ISO image is an archive file (also known as a disc image) of an optical disc in a format defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This format is supported by many software vendors. ISO image files typically have a file extension of .iso. The name ISO is taken from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media, but an ISO image can also contain a UDF file system since UDF is backward-compatible with ISO 9660.

If you were to send someone an ISO disc image, they could mount the disc and discover all the contents inside. However, the transfer might be subject to transmission errors and as a result there would be no way to tell if the transfer was 100% successful. 

DDP attempts to eliminate these variables by including a check sum file that ensures the de-coding process is done with 100% accuracy.  DDP file sets can be transfered via Internet and the replication house would be able to tell if the transfer was correct.

However, because of manufacturing liabilities, most factories refuse to press DDP images unless a check disc is created and sent to the client for testing.  Since this generally defeats the purpose of sending data electronically, it only is suitable for authors wishing to speed the process up by allowing them to send finals to the mastering house for final testing.  

ISO / DDP images are not suitable for clients wishing to burn direct to glass except in the most dire cases where they are OK to sign a waiver form absolving the factory of any formatting issues that arise during pressing. 

If you are willing to forgo all warnings and proceed with an ISO / DDP disc image upload, please do the following:

1. create your ISO or ISO/DDP disc image and ZIP into a single archive file.   

2. The ZIP file should be named in relation to your order or quote number:    eg:   904123_iso.zip 

3. Use Yousendit to upload your disc archive 

4. Download and complete a disc waiver PDF and fax it to us (number inside the PDF)