Burning To Multiple Drives At once

[MB212]

Can anyone recommend a burning software to burn to multiple drives at once. I have a computer with 3 DVD drives in it, and I want to be able to copy 1 disc to 2 discs, and also burn 1 video from Avid to 3 drives at once. I have DVD Architect and Ulead DVD burning programs, and neither have the ability to burn to multiple drives that I can see.

[aedipuss]

while theoretically possible, if all the drives are the same model and have exactly the same firmware, you won't find those options any more. it was tried years ago and never very successfully. nero was one that had the option. that was back when a burn could take an hour, now with 5 minute burns it won't cost you much time.

if you are going to be doing it all the time then buy a cd/dvd multidrive duplicator.

[Brainiac]

What I usually do in those cases is create an iso file from the dvd authoring software, then run multiple instances of ImgBurn, write image file to disc for each instance, and set each instance to it's own drive. Best of all, it costs nothing!

Brainiac

[Cornucopia]

while theoretically possible, if all the drives are the same model and have exactly the same firmware, you won't find those options any more. it was tried years ago and never very successfully. nero was one that had the option. that was back when a burn could take an hour, now with 5 minute burns it won't cost you much time.

if you are going to be doing it all the time then buy a cd/dvd multidrive duplicator.

That's not true. Back when I did lots of CD & DVD dubbing at my former production company, we wanted to expand the workload but the owner wouldn't put out more money for equipment. So I cobbled together an unused Pc, made the OS lean (just a few main apps), and ran either 4 or 8 drives on it using Nero. All different drives, too. Cost next to nothing.

But there are other pro options, like Discjuggler.

I do agree though that if you are doing this regularly, it makes much more sense to use a dedicated dupe tower. And you should primarily be burning from ISOs, as was mentioned.

Scott

[Brainiac]

I agree with the above recommendations about getting a dedicated dupe tower if the dupes will be ongoing. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I ended up doing years ago. I purchased one that has an option to connect to the computer via usb and has a built-in hard drive, so that isos can be transferred to the hard drive. So if a client comes to me six months after a project was completed, I can easily burn a copy of the project. But, if the dupe tower goes bad, I still have a duplicating workflow until I can replace the tower or get it repaired.

Brainiac

[classfour]

Alcohol was the only one that I used for multiple burns - Nero sometimes puked.

That was running matched drives, on a clean system.

[Cornucopia]

My copy of Nero worked OK (even with the different drives), but I didn't push the burn speed either (~12-16x for CDs, ~4x for DVDs - that was back when...).

Scott