LGR Oddware - Tattooing CD-Rs with Yamaha DiscT@2 

Spelling Tattoo as "T@2"... nothing gets more late 90s/early 2000s than that LMAO.

21:17 is the "Yeah, fuck it, I'm using that take" laugh and I LOVE it

I love that in the 90's and 2000's they used the @ symbol as part of marketing everything 🤣

The fact that there are even options to change the text color in the T@2 editor tells me that it was originally a CD label editing program (for paper labels) and the coders didn't bother to remove the color options. You just gotta love bundled software.

I can just hear the R&D manager: "That is an interesting idea...you can use company resources but you work on it on your own time"

I'm glad I'm experiencing this twenty years later rather than being a disappointed teenager trying to get it to work.

9:08 oohh that transition was nice

One thing that I think is really beautiful about this channel, is the longer LRG goes on, Clint actually looks happier, healthier and more full of life with each passing day. I don't know if you'll see this Clint, but if you do, I just wanna say I love seeing you love what you do so much. ♥

“You can’t see the tattoos!” So basically this is a device for reducing the usable area of a CD?

Seems like the definition of a solution looking for a problem.

I still own my USB 2.0 version of this drive and I love it! I've never used the Disc T@2 function, and am unlikely to ever do so. But, I work in the audio industry and the Master Quality whatever they call it is a terrific feature that is still useful for me to this day. (I work sales and I used burn discs often for demo purposes). When writing a CD-R at high speeds, high-end CD players often can be finicky about reading them accurately. Audiophiley CD players are notorious for skipping more frequently than many budget players. (I don't know if it's because better DACs try to avoid error correction or if something else is at play. I'll let more qualified folk debate that) They're especially really picky about CD-Rs, sometimes skipping too easily or not wanting to read at all. The master quality feature burns the pits and lands extra wide, which makes it easier for the pickup to read. It also reduces the amount of usable space on the CDR by a small amount, but I never found a player that wouldn't play them without any issue at all. Even the pickiest, most delicate CD transports read the discs without error or skips or general grumbling. And it made my car CD player at the time far more skip resistant, too. CD Players may be less common these days, but when I find a need to burn an audio disc, I still dust this thing off and use it.

This seems like the kind of thing where someone would be in their room one day checking out their disks, holding one up to the light and going, "A-Are those... Words?"

When I was in High School in the early 2000s I had a friend in a band and did this on their CD's of their logo and I was blown away how they were able to do this. Nope I finally have my answer 20 years later. I had no idea this was a thing!

You know it's the early 2000s when there's a Nero logo slapped on somewhere.

That CRT to image capture transition is an absolute masterpiece, I rewound the video like 5 times just to look at that.

I'm imaging the stacks of 1000's of test CDs the developers threw away while working on this.

Nero Burning Rom...now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time...

When the oddware is so odd Clint straight-up bluescreens the outtro

Man, in 2002 I could see myself buying one of these to make my bands single stand out at band battles and open mics. I was a gig manager around 2010 and we were always looking for gimmicks to make our samples stand out.

Me: I can't decide if I want to buy a motorcycle, a musical instrument, some electronic hardware, or a tattoo. Yamaha: No matter what, I gotchu fam.

As instructed, I'm letting you know down here in the comments, that I very much did like seeing it - a certain percent at a time and from different angles.

This happens when engineers have too much time and companies too much money. AND I LOVE IT.

Not only did I enjoy "seeing" this, I also enjoyed reading the closed captions. My favourite was "Oddware induced chuckle."

I can only see this being useful in the case of a company with sensitive disc information, where you wouldn't want someone removing or coving the label a top the cd/dvd for security reasons.

Im going on Limewire to download In_the_end.mp3.exe and you can’t stop me

Back then it was pretty common for audio CDs to be around 40 minutes so nearly half the disc was unused. I guess that's where the idea came from.

I just happen to land on this page randomly and it brought back fond memories. Back in the early 2000s, we had a music label doing rap music in Houston. We had a studio, made mixtapes, recording, engineering, etc. I saw the drives online and I purchased a Yamaha F1 Internal drive and was excited to use the Disc T@2. Remarkably, we did buy the expensive CDRs but weren't happy with the results and it wasn't cost effective; if I recall, the CDRs were around 4/5 bucks a pop. We ended up trying a few different ones (including the Memorex color ones you used!) but eventually we tried the regular CD-Rs we always got at Fry's, their in house brand, the GQ CD-Rs. It looked pretty dope. We started doing our mixes to only about 50/60 minutes to leave as much room as possible for the tattoo. It was a huge hit; folks loved it and we even used it to our advantage that "If it ain't tatted it's some wack shht" (I know, it sounds corny, but it was actually pretty tough). We used the system as a copyright / legit way of verifying our CDs (even though all the music and instrumentals we used we downloaded illegally through Soulseek / FTP DJ only record pools). We used the Avery labels on the front like everyone else did but the T@2 was our call sign. We sold so many CDs from the back our cars, at clubs, at the park, I bought my first Cadillac that way. The drive itself was incredibly sturdy as well. We had a several burners going and even had a multi burner that burned 4 CDRs at a time but because we wanted the special label we burned almost all our CDs for several moths with that burner. Eventually we would only do special editions with the tattoo because we couldn't keep up, even after buying another Yamaha burner. Eventually, my homie / partner got locked up and my second son was soon to be born and we shut everything down. In a final act of pettiness, I did sell my rig with one of the drives but switched out the version of the NERO that was on there as the guy I was selling it to was a frenemy and intended to do the same work we did. MF never got it going and I'm sure he never figured it out.

I can actually imagine bands shipping limited edition CD albums with cool art that's intentionally hard to see.

Man, I'm happy this was a good drive just in general, besides the "DiscT@2" gimmick - I was in high school when this released and for some reason my teenage self was convinced I needed to have this feature. I was sure it was going to be the coolest thing and oh so useful, so I saved up my money and bought an internal version of this drive. And rather predictably, I could count on one hand the number of times I actually used the DiscT@2 feature. And the CD-Rs I used when I first bought it were actually rather suitable, the "tattoo" showed up somewhat clearly on them, but of course it just wasn't as cool or nearly as useful as I thought it would be. I burned a lot of regular discs with it though, so it was useful in general - but today I'm entirely unsurprised that I never had any real use for the special feature. And seriously, DiscT@2 is the most early 2000's name on anything. Today I kind of feel embarrassed just for not having rejected it because of the name alone :)

The thing I enjoyed most about this episode is seeing it

Really appreciate the attention you pay to the captions! thanks for caring beyond the auto-generated ones.

Came to just say I loved to pop out animation when he went from camera to the desktop capture.

How to Make a CD Unusable: Chapter 3

When you need a tattoo on literally everything. Yamaha has you covered. You can't see it most of the time, but you have the peace of mind that you have wasted much needed storage space. lol

I must applaud the commitment to the "T@2" throughout the subtitles.

It wasn't trying to set the world on fire... It just wanted to start a flame in your heart.

there’s always something classy about a yamaha optical drive

Yes! Oddware gives me life! Something about just these kooky ideas that fit a need in theory but in practice just never came out fully baked... keep being awesome LGR!

Me: "Comic Sans Comic Sans Comic Sans!" LGR: "Hehe, we can go comic sans if you want." Me: " \o/ \o/ \o/"

I'm a simple man, i see that clint uploaded oddware, and demand he upload more oddware.

You know, this *could* be a cool thing for an easter egg in a music album release

Mmm that CRT to full screen transition :D

Most often I overburned my CDs. I couldn't have used this feature ever.

I loved burning CDs and DVDs back in the days. Despite all the awesome technologies we have today (flash storage, huge hard drives, cloud), burning CDs is one of the things I miss the most from the early 2000s. I still have my first ever CD-RW drive, an old Acer 4X

Took me a while to get that the "DiscT@2" stands for Disc Tatoo when I was staring at the video title before watching the vid haha

I'm surprised why Yamaha promoted this technology to home users, not a software publishers as a "anti-counterfeiting measure" or some other nonsense.

I quite like these videos explaining old hardware, and appreciate all the detail you go to the effort of putting in. Thank you.

I would have totally used this every time I burned a disc to "impress" the guys at the LAN party

This is like the alternate universe version of lightscribe and I'm here for it

I wonder what the black memorex cd 💿 would have looked liked “tattooed”

Damn, I'm so relieved that I didn't spend my money on this back in the day. I put the money towards Gamecube games instead.

Excellent video! I love LGR and more so, the whole oddware series. Thanks!

Technology Connection mentioned this briefly in his LightScribe video, and the main thing I remember is how (rightfully) angry he was about the name.

Finally, I can properly label my 'TATU Greatest Hit' CD.

Always looking forward to see your videos on Friday, best start of my weekend. Cheers

Yay! Oddware! Please please please do more in this series. It's what got me hooked on the channel originally! 😁

I can see this being used as a secret means of communication for a drug cartel back in the early 2000's. Lol

Now my Friday Afternoon in the UK has started with this fine LGR Oddware video. Many thanks sir and ooh, this is for sure something odd and I have never ever seen or heard of one of these before now

Off work for the weekend, AND there's a new Oddware video? Fantastic!

LGR your videos always bring me way back. Loved those memorex color cds. Used to burn music on them and thought they were so cool. Back when I still used diskmans. I was actually thinking about how they would turn out with the tattoo and you pulled them out! Good show 👏

This feels like a rewards for waking up early. Please never change.

(sees a disc tattooing drive) "Shut up and take my money!" (sees that it tattoos on the data side of the disc) "On second thought, give me my money back."

Perfect transition between the filming the monitor and screen capture! 🤌(chef’s kiss)😘 amazing work, Clint!!

So, no one is going to talk about the smooth transition at 9:09!?

Not to be outdone, Seagate introduced the HD T@ six months later, with about the same level of visibility.

Long time viewer, first time commenter. THANK YOU! You have been a light in my dark tunnel, you have given me the confidence to repair and build pc's. Long story short... Thank you LGR

Great video as always. Keep them coming.

Videos like this are one of the many reasons I sub to your channel.

Clint completely losing it at the end is what I needed today. 😂

Picture this: You get sent a CD-R with a case that says "shine this CD in the light." So you lift the CD over a light source, and etched into it is a freaking copypasta.

I thought this was going to be something I remember from my childhood where you could print CD labels and stamp them onto CDs. Honestly that seems like a better option looking at this. At least the sticker won’t take up disc memory.

I really loved the transition effect @ 9:08 it give a dramatic feel to your entertaining presentation anytime. A fan and an admirer from Pakistan!

Man, Nero brought back some memories. Mostly bad ones.

It's not an LGR video without typing "FARTS" on something.

"Datacide" sounds like a ca. 1994 DOS game with a (hackneyed) cyberpunk theme.

Burning a LightScribe image on one side and a DiscT@2 on the other seems like prime Blurbs content.

Those colored CD-Rs were the most interesting thing in this video, imagine wasting so much money back in the day on something this useless.

Love having more Clint on camera. Charisma out the wazooo

A tattooing CD drive is something I never thought I’d hear of, but this is so freaking cool! And SO 90s! I love it! The comic sans got me good too! Either way, thanks for the really fun and interesting video Clint!

Been a while since I’ve watched one of your videos. I find your voice very calming.

This would be amazing to hide clues in an escape room!

Man I love your instantly contagious laugh. Always makes my day. Just rewatching the Neural Filters Blerb can significantly improve my mood.

Wow I didn't know about this gadget! Seeing you burning a cd with Nero sent me through a nostalgia trip!

Love your videos man!

Is it TWAIN over SCSI. Otherwise known as "Technology without an interesting name" over "System can't see it."

Odds are my absolute favorite from among your series

I still have one of these CRW-F1 drives in one of my PCs, the internal ATA version. The PC still has Windows XP SP3 with the Nero 5 software on it, so everything is full functional. In the time that software was distributed on CD-R media to customers, the drive was used to put the software name, release number and the company logo as a kind of watermark on the CD with the Disc T@2 feature. This worked quite well. We got comments from customers who found it looked very cool. Now, as you discovered, the type of dye used on de CD-R makes a lot of difference. In the early days, cyanine was used. This is a blue dye. Since most CD-R were copper coloured, the dye looked green. When they switched to silver coloured CD-Rs, the dye looked of course blue. Disc T@2 works quite well with these CD-Rs. This type of dye is however not so stable on the long run, causing the dreaded "CD Rot", specially on the el-cheapo CD-Rs. Around 2000 Mitsui started to use pthalocyanine. This dye has a very light green colour and is far more stable than cyanine. Other manufacturers switched to this dye as well over time. This type of dye is bad for using with Disc T@2, as it has almost no contrast. This is the dye you used on the CD-R where the Disc T@2 was almost invisible. The Azo dye you also tested is a lot darker and has more contrast and works reasonably well with Disc T@2, similar to the cyanine dye. Basically, if you can clearly see the part of the CD-R that is used by the data, then Disc T@2 will work fine as well on that type of CD. Otherwise forget it. Disc T@2 was an idea with limited use to begin with. An alternative to the dreaded stickers you could print and stick to the label side. Lightscribe was something similar. In the end, printable CDs that has a label side that you can print on with an inkjet printer made all these techniques obsolete.

Your volume icon-only system tray is so satisfying.

The “reverse” of this technology, the LightScribe burner drive, makes sense since that allows you to burn an label image on the label side of special LightScribe CD-R/DVD-R discs, even if the technology never really caught on. This however does not make sense to me why you’d want this. But I guess they were just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

I always remembered CD=RW always refused to work in my CD-R Burners just like him lol.

I think in the late '90s, early '00s, I had more "buffer underrun" coasters than actual burnt CDs.

I have no idea why or where it's coming from, but when you held the disc up to the light I had this fleeting nostalgic flashback to the early 2000's. It was just a sense of joy and a hint of a memory that I can't quite place.

My god. Those colored CD-R's look delicious!

Its Friday. I've got my coffee, and there's a new Oddware video? Perfect.

Oh yeah, that really brought back memories of my Yamaha drive. I tried _"disc tee at numeral two -ing"_ exactly once and had much the same experience. Just made a simple label of the title of the disc and it was barely visible. It helped to reflect the ceiling light in the centre of the disc, but it was still pretty much pointless. I bought my drive because I was using an old 8x SCSI CD-R drive and wanted to upgrade, and there was an internal SCSI version of the drive. Or at least a SCSI option. It was actually a plug-in module that stuck onto the back of the drive, and converted the IDE interface on the drive to SCSI. The drive and adapter worked out cheaper than a native SCSI drive, and most of the SCSI drives had lower maximum speeds at the time anyway. The thing I liked best about using a SCSI drive, and the reason I kept using them for so long, was that I literally never had a buffer underrun. Burning files, writing ISO images, copying directly from one drive to another (all perfectly legal backups, of course), even later upgrading to a SCSI DVD burner, every disc was a success. My friends would complain about wasting discs on buffer underruns, and not being able to copy reliably drive to drive, but I'd just be like, "you want me to try" and blow them away with the buffer stuck at 100% the whole time. I could even do other stuff on my PC while the disc was copying in the background! I finally gave up on SCSI when my slot-loading Pioneer DVD burner died. SATA drives were just so much cheaper and easier to find, and had no problem resuming buffer underruns. And moving to a SATA drive was the first time I actually experienced a buffer underrun. I was even shocked when one disc failed to resume, and the burn actually failed for the first time! Anys ways. I have actually got a bunch of SCSI stuff still, and AkBKukU's video on the SCSI2SD adapter made me really want to buy one, so maybe I'll pull out the Yamaha drive some day and get to use it again!

I bought an NEC ND-4551 in 2006 and it was advertised as coming with "Label Flash", which was not the reason I bought it. I definitely used it a few times though and the results were pretty good, about as good as the final disc in this video. Definitely only for niche applications, but it was fun giving CDs/DVDs to your friends and they would get annoyed that I hadn't labelled it, then seeing their face when I tell them I wrote it on the other side... and I wasn't lying.

Could it be used to "tattoo" the security ring on to burned sega saturn games?

18:54 What a farting relief. Thought we might get a whole Oddware without farts.

Oh man! I thought I was the only person to ever own one of these! I distinctly remember thinking "This is the future, just look at that blue read/write LED!"

Nice to see The Settlers in the background - put a lot of time into that one on the Amiga back in the day :)