The day has come for me to finally submit the content (album artwork and music) of Bits and Pieces to CD Baby to be manufactured! This is GREAT news. Or, it would be... if I could do it successfully.
I've been trying ALL DAY to get this to work, and once I solve one problem, another one presents itself! It's a bit frustrating.
The first part is easy: create the album artwork. Check. That's done.
Then I export the files as PDFs because that is the file format that CD Baby accepts. So I upload the files on their website...
...and it looks like everything is going great! But then I find that the artwork doesn't fit the templates -- even though I was very careful to create the artwork with the template boundaries VISIBLE the entire time I was creating it!
I figured out that they wanted me to save the file as a PDF, rather than export it as a PDF (who would have made the distinction?). So, I figured that would solve the problem. Except, it didn't really.
I uploaded all the new files then proceeded with this screen:
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| Remember, I decided to purchase a UPC for Bits and Pieces (I wrote a post about it. Read it here.) |
It gave me choices as to where I wanted the UPC barcode to go on the artwork, but it didn't give the outside of the tray card (back of the album) as an option! I knew something had to be wrong since most, if not all albums have the UPC barcode on the back cover. It turns out that that issue had an easy fix -- I uploaded the file for the outside of the tray card in the wrong slot. When I fixed that, the option to put the UPC on the outside of the tray card became available.
And THEN, thinking I had all the issues fixed, I tried to place the UPC barcode where I wanted it on the back of the album, but it wouldn't let me place it in the bottom right corner! Upon digging through CD Baby website's support section and sifting through Google search results, I was able to solve that problem by simply re-uploading the PDFs.
And now I am here. Sigh. I decided to take a break from this craziness to write a rant-like blog post, and then I'll go right back to working on this. Wish me luck!
