A variety of paper grades manufactured especially for offset lithography printing. Standard art paper is either gloss or matt coated, and then can have either a gloss or matt finish applied after printing, to protect the inks.

BIEM is the international organisation representing mechanical rights societies. Mechanical rights societies exist in most countries. In the UK for example your organisations would be MCPS/PRS/PPL. They license the reproduction of songs (including musical, literary and dramatic works). Their members are composers, authors and publishers and their clients are record companies and other users of recorded music. Every time a CD, audio cassette or vinyl record containing protected musical works is made, the producers require a license from the owner of the works and they must pay royalties for each copy they manufacture and sell.

The bleed area is a designated section that will be trimmed away to leave the final product with a continuous print right up to the edge of the product. The background colour or image of your artwork should be extended past the trim lines, all the way to the outer bleed line which is shown as a red line on our templates. This is necessary as it allows our print team a small amount of space to account for movement of paper, printing plates or any slight movement during the cutting/folding stage. This is all part of the print tolerances.

Cassette duplication is the process of taking one master recording of both side A and side B and copying that onto one big “super tape” with the album repeated as many times as there are copies to be made, all on one giant reel that is then fed and cut to size into each plastic cassette shell, one by one. This means your tapes are tailor sized to the longest side of your audio master.

Catalogue numbers are used as standard within the music industry to track and identify orders. CD and record manufacturers, labels, retailers and distributors use them to give every release a unique identifying code. Generally speaking catalogue numbers use a combination of standard unicode characters. If you're pressing for the first time or starting up a new project, please feel free to get creative with your catalogue number. Our account managers will happily assign you with something sensible if not.

Cellophane wrap is a stretchable plastic film that holds a package tightly together when wrapped. Also see shrink-wrap.

CMYK is a traditional printing method that combines four separate colour plates - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black – this is a professional industry standard method and colour model for full colour offset printing. CMYK printing is also referred to as four colour process printing.

This relates to the number of colour plates required to print to each side of the stock. For example, 4/1 would print full colour CMYK; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black), on the front with Black only (K) on the rear, where 4/4 would be full colour on both sides of the stock.

Disc Description Protocol (DDP) is a format for specifying the content of optical discs, and can be used for making cassettes. Essentially it is a digital image of a physical disc and is widely supplied as a master disc for duplication and replication services.

The DDP image file set should contain at least the following components;

• Audio image (.DAT file)

• DDP Identifier (DDPID)

• DDP Stream descriptor (DDPMS)

• Subcode descriptor (PQ DESCR)

• MD5 Checksum

Digital audio mastering is the final step of audio post-production, balancing the sonic elements of the stereo mix and optimising playback across all systems and media formats. Mastering was traditionally an analogue process requiring specific studio equipment, nowadays there are also many digital solutions available. We offer full mastering services.

Digital printing is the method of printing from a digital-based image directly to a variety of media using laser or inkjet printers, allowing for short turnaround times and printing of variable data sets.

Simply; estimated shipping date. This is when your order is expected to be ready to ship. We will be in touch at this point to provide a firm delivery date.

This is the type of tape we use - Ferric oxide (Fe2O3) BASF tape, this is a magnetically responsive medium that can be written into using magnetism and read back by the same use of magnetism by the play head of a tape player.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) are sites used to transfer large files and sets of data such as music and artwork files from one computer to another. These were commonly used by those with the know-how and correct software, but thankfully today there are many reliable, advert free FTP sites available for the general public to use. Many of these sites offer free to use options as well as premium accounts with lots of extra features such as security, editing and long-term hosting. DMS recommend but are not endorsed or affiliated with WeTransfer.com, Dropbox.com, Hightail.com or filemail.com.

Graphic design is the process of visual communication and problem-solving using typography, photography and illustration. Graphic designers create and combine symbols, images and text to form visual representations of ideas and messages to appeal to certain tastes or trends. DMS have an in-house team of designers who process and check all artwork before your order enters production. Should you wish to utilise their design skills for your release, please check out our Graphic Design section.

An acronym for grams per square metre. An industry standardised measurement of paper and card quality. The higher the GSM number, the heavier the stock.

This is the physical action of packing one part of a product to another. This is mostly done by hand by the packing teams at the plant, and thus often carries a small charge per unit.

The International Standard Recording Code system is the international system for the identification of recorded music and music videos. Each ISRC is a unique identifier that can be permanently encoded into a recording or music video.

Encoded ISRCs can provide the means to automatically identify recordings, to ensure that you get paid any royalty payments due. PPL is the appointed sole agency for ISRC in the UK, please contact them to assign codes to your tracks. DMS are unable to generate ISRCs for you, but once you have them we are able to add to your masters. For more information please visit the PPL website.

Once you have received your ISRCs from PPL, we would be happy to embed them onto your master.

Knockout is the .opposite of overprinting, whereby the top element literally knocks out (deletes) any artwork underneath. This helps to ensure it stays true to its colour by printing directly to the surface of the material being applied to. For example, using blue text on a yellow background, you would want it to knock out so it prints to the white of the paper, otherwise the yellow might cause the blue to turn green.

Also known as turnaround times, lead times are simply the amount of time between the initiation and completion of the production process. Lead times can vary as production demand fluctuates, so serve only as a rough guide. For current lead times please give us a call or drop us an email.

Low contrast refers to adjacent colours within a design, where the colour values are very similar to the background colour. For example, this could be a dark grey pattern with ink levels that are just a few percent lower than that of the background such as a rich black. When viewed on screen there is a subtle but visible difference. However, print often appears darker than it does on screen, so that subtle difference could be lost. It occurs most often with darker colours. We recommend at least 20% difference between total ink levels to help avoid the risk.

The minimum recommended colour values to ensure the print registers the colours is 5% for cyan, magenta and black, and 10% for yellow. Any parts for the design which fall below these levels may not register and is something to consider when setting up your artwork/deciding on colours. If the colour does not register/print then the card stock may be visible.

Overprinting is opting to print one colour on top of another. For example, if you have a shape or text that is a black on a background that does not contain any black (k) such as a pale yellow, then we would recommend setting the black to (k only) to overprint that black shape on top of the yellow.

A PQ sheet is a report containing information about an audio master. This normally includes track names, lengths, timings and gaps etc.

Raster graphics, also called bitmap graphics, a type of digital image that uses rectangular pixels arranged in a grid formation to represent an image. Because the format can support a wide range of colours and depict subtle graduated tones, it is well-suited for displaying continuous-tone images such as photographs or shaded drawings, along with other detailed images. Raster graphics typically have larger file sizes than their vector counterparts.

The safety area is shown as a blue zone on the template. This is a 3mm area inside of any trim or fold line that we advise you keep free of important information such as text or logos. This is recommended to allow for any slight movement during the cutting/folding stage. This allowance is referred to as print tolerances. Anything important that is left within the safety area could be at risk of trimming or being on a fold line.

This is the name for the plastic casing that holds the tape spool, it’s the part you hold when you are putting the cassette into and out of a player and has writing on it typically – we refer to it separately as you can select many different colour and effect options for your shell, even different on each side if you want.

Shrink-wrapping is applied loosely around a product and shrinks tightly when heat is applied. We always recommend shrink-wrap or overbags to reduce the risk of split spines and damages in transit to your end customers.

A spool is the name for the tape when it is attached at both ends to a spindle inside the tape cassette itself.

Sometimes a varnish isn't applied to the entire surface but only used to make certain elements stand out. This is called a spot gloss UV varnish.

This describes the length of recordable tape on the cassette. The C means Cassette and the number is for the length of both sides added together. The maximum DMS offers is a C90 tap to fit 90 mins of audio, 45 mins per side.

For example:

C20 = 20 mins of audio (split over 10 mins per side)

C40 = 40 mins of audio (split over 20 mins per side)

C60 = 60 mins of audio (split over 30 mins per side)

A guide detailing the dimensions, fold and cut lines required for each printed part. We have downloadable templates for all of our most common vinyl packaging configurations.

Trapping is the technique used to compensate for registration/misalignment issues of successive/adjacent colours by adding a small overlap. It ensures that there are no ugly gaps, white hairlines where the paper shows through or overlaps in the final printed result. We recommend trapping of 0.05mm.

UV printing is a print method that allows inks to be applied to many different surfaces (in this case, cassette shells). A UV light is used to cure the inks so that they dry hard.

Vector-based images are comprised of paths, which are defined by a start and end point, along with other points, curves, and angles along the way. These paths are essentially mathematical shapes that can be scaled to a larger size and not lose any image quality. This makes vector graphics ideal for logos and text, which can be small enough to appear on a business card or increased to billboard size without pixelation.

Vector graphics are best suited to solid areas of colours and for use in screen printing.

We would recommend keeping all of your text as ‘live text’ (not flattening the layer or rasterizing it) so that it retains its vector quality and prints clearly with sharp corners/edges.

Our smallest recommended text size is 6pt Arial or the equivalent.