Burning Works of Art Onto CDs Using a Typical CD-RW Drive

Have an old CD burner and some discs laying around? Why not turn them into works of art! To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the compact disc, arduinocelentano created some novel artwork using a typical CD-RW drive without LightScribe, LabelTag, or other hacks. Instead, he used some revamped coordinate conversion code he created back in 2008 and inspiration from a pair of Instructables users.

“I know of at least two successful attempts to implement a similar technique. One was accomplished about 15 years ago by [argon] Instructables user. That code was more proof-of-concept than the universal method, but it was impressive! I suppose there was a huge amount of work behind it," arduinocelentano writes in his project blog.

“Another attempt was made by a user with nickname [unDEFER] (no English documentation, unfortunately). These two projects inspired me some time ago. And in fact, my coordinate conversion code is mostly based on [unDEFER]’s implementation. I also used geometric parameters of some compact discs from that project. I acknowledge and am grateful to these developers for their contributions.”

Arduinocelentano originally created a GUI with visual preview mode to burn art onto CDs, but abandoned the project due to calibration difficulties for every brand and type of disc on the market then (2008). He has since brushed up the code and ported it to Qt 6, which lets users develop apps with intuitive interfaces for 2D and 3D visuals.

Arduinocelentano’s method utilizes specific data to form darker or lighter areas on the CD by converting image data to polar coordinates. Of course, the process is more complicated than it sounds, but the end result is incredibly detailed images forever immortalized on a once-popular medium.