Adventures in finding genuine Scott catalog software

Khi,

I look forward to your posts on this subject. I have been considering acquiring CD version and I had planned to look at the secondary market. What ever I buy, I want to make sure it is legitimate. A few years back I bought a pirated Steiner CD. I was most distressed to have been duped. 
David

Sorry about the time between posts. Trying to juggle several tasks at once. 3920004554

First of all, genuine Scott CDs are "manufactured" CDs. Because they require special set-up, they are produced by the thousands++ in one production run. The CDs are produced with the data already in the media. There is no "CD burning" step.

The CDs we make at home, or "produce-on-demand" CDs (like the Steiner CDs), are "burned" from CD-R blanks that you can buy off the shelf at the store. Manufactured CDs, on the other hand, are fabricated with the data already in the media (it is not burned in).

So by flipping the CD over, you can quickly tell a manufactured CD from a "burned" CD. Below, the first picture the data side of a counterfeit Scott CD. It is a "burned" CD -- you can see the "ring" where the data was burned. The ring grows from the inside toward the outside edge of the CD. Disregard the sector of darkness to the right and to the left -- it is an artifact of the picture taking. The ring will differ in width based on how mach data was burned, but is typical of "home-made" CDs. No matter how good the outside packaging looks or whether there is printing on the face of the CD, if you see the ring then it is not a genuine Scott CD.



Now compare to the data side of a genuine Scott CD:



Compare the 2 CD data side pics. The genuine CD has no ring, because it is manufactured. If the burned CD is "full", then the ring may not be obvious.

So the other way is to look at the numbers on the hub!!! Blank CD-Rs will have a "spray-on" number near the hub edge. The manufactured CD lacks this spray-on number. It only has the manufactured number in the area between the hub and the data. Blank CD-Rs will someones also have a number there. But if there is a spray-on number on the hub itself, then it was orinally a CD-R blank and not a manufactured CD.

If you have some, you can compare your own blank CD-Rs to some commercially-produced music CDs you might have purchased.

If you buy a second hand Scott CD, you can always ask them to provide a pic of the data side.

In the next post, we will discuss how to tell from the "front side" in case you don't have or can't get hold of a pic of the data side.

Here's one of the better counterfeits that I've encountered. Once you open it, you can still see it is a burned CD, but the quality is quite good. It came in a shrink-wrapped jewel case, and jewel case insert is quite convincing. So until you open it up, it looks good from the front and back. Below are pictures of the front and back, respectively.