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May 2012

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CPM Reviews: XLNT Idea Nexis 100AP CD/DVD Publisher

by John F. McJunkin

As the guy who has the job of creating a bunch of discs at the end of Sunday services, I’m always interested in a device that will make my job easier. And in my church, we have a disc copier that makes pretty quick work of reproducing the master disc that just came fresh out of the CD recorder ... but only three at a time. And that’s no big deal. My church serves lunch after services, and usually by the end of lunch, we’ve managed to make enough copies to send everyone home with a disc. But our labeling scheme leaves a bit to be desired. As the discs come out of the copier, I put a pre-printed label on each one. It’s not very high tech, but it’s functional. When I was asked to review the XLNT Idea Nexis 100AP CD/DVD Publisher, I was excited to get a look at a device that might replace me as the entity that labels the discs.

The Nexis 100AP is not just a disc duplicator, nor is it just a printer. It is both; hence it is designated a “publisher.” It connects to your computer via USB cable, and the computer provides all the necessary data–specifically the image that will be printed on the top of the disc, and the files that are burned on the other side. There are three computer applications associated with the Nexis 100AP–DiscWorks, DiscStudio, and DiscDirect. The software is not currently available for Macintosh, but I’m told that XLNT Idea is in the process of porting the software right now as we speak.

Since installation and operation on one of my many Macs wasn’t going to happen, I moved on to my Windows computer. I discovered that installing the necessary drivers on a Vista machine is a challenge, if not downright difficult–a fact acknowledged by the kindly tech support gentleman with whom I spoke. I discovered one other potential source for frustration: the publisher simply cannot be used with a Windows Vista computer with less than 1GB of RAM.

Luckily, memory is cheap, and I upgraded from half a gigabyte to a gigabyte and a half and proceeded along. In fairness, despite the Vista-oriented difficulties, I’m led to conclude that the entire experience on a Windows XP computer is vastly simpler and user-friendly.

Once the drivers and software were installed and functional, I proceeded to get the printer component aligned properly. XLNT Idea spells out the setup, installation, and alignment process very clearly with a nice “Start Here” document. I went on to make some discs of audio and data varieties. Using DiscStudio software, I was able to very easily create some nice looking graphics and text, incorporating photographic images from the included library.

And since I’m admittedly a sound guy (and decidedly not a graphics guy), the fact that I was able to create such nice images is really saying something. From what I can tell, you wouldn’t have to use DiscStudio to create the disc images, but after using it, I simply can’t imagine why you would want to use anything else. It’s very intuitive, and assists the user in ensuring that the image will work on the surface of a disc. It’s also simple, which helps graphics neophytes like me by avoiding the pitfall of presenting way too many options. I put together some beautiful images literally in just a few minutes, and was ready to move on to the next stage.

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John McJunkin is the CEO of Avalon Podcasting in Chandler, Arizona, which offers high quality podcast production and consultation services to a broad range of clients. He’s also the host of the Podcast Pro Tech & Tips Podcast at www.avalonpodcasting.com.