The DDPi (Disc Description Protocol image) is now acknowledged as the superior production master for any optical disc medium - CD, DVD or Blu Ray. The DDPi is an absolutely error-free master, which creates a superior sounding CD in the case of audio, and also creates CDs that are more reliably played by cheap CD players, boom boxes, car players etc.
Originally just DDP, it has actually been around for more than a decade, and has been the standard in video for that long. It also has been in use in audio CD mastering and replication, but on a much smaller scale. The DDP breaks the audio, subcodes, TOC and metadata down into separate elements; five or six files total in the file set. It was originally delivered on an 8mm video cartridge created by a machine called an Exabyte. The downside was it required a specific, costly machine at both the mastering room and the CD plant. And it was a mechanical tape cartridge, which can fail. So enter the future, and for some, the present: DDPi. DDPi contains all of the elements of a DDP Exabyte tape, but it is written directly to a hard drive in the mastering room and can then be delivered to the CD plant on a data CD-R or DVD or if available it can be uploaded directly to a CD plant's server. For your reference, DES will upload the DDPi along with our DDPi player which will allow you to listen to the master, check CD-TEXT and ISRC's, and burn your own CD. A huge advantage to this is that you will be using the exact DDPi that we will be sending to the plant.
The only downside, if you want to call it that, is that you have to use a cutting edge mastering room that understands and can create a DDPi file set, like DES Mastering (www.desmastering.com) for instance, and you have to use a CD manufacturer that can utilize the technology, which coincidentally DES can steer you to.
