no more gacha hell

Photo cards (aka bromides, PA shots, pashacolle/pashacore...)

Album CDs (present set for album series coming soon)

In progress:

Plushies (aka Nuis)

To-do list:

Photo prints (postcard size & up)

Other plushes - MochiMochi (TsumTsum style), Omanjuu, other

Buttons

Figurines (Tiny Beans style for enstars, could apply to other kinds?)

Testing different color settings on my printer for the pashas, and I got closer (the kanata/shinobu n the outside - default settings - vs the inside after I changed settings). But from the Chiaki & Niki comparison you can see there's still this fuzziness compared to the CVS prints on the sides. I'm gonna cave and buy some better quality paper & ink to see if that fixes it

Because $15 pre-tax, pre-shipping, and pre-proxy fees for a CD with two songs on it is just heinous. And graphic design is fun!

This cost me $6 for 1 CD, but I had old CDs and cases lying around plus access to a computer with a disc drive. Assuming you have access to none of those things, costs are:

~$20, cheap USB disc drive

~$10, CDs in (not slim) jewel cases - cheapest initial cost seems to be packs of 5 at $2-5 each

~$6 for lyric booklet and back cover print (approx. $0.70 per sheet; may differ for your area, but to estimate use 0.7*([# songs you want] + 2)

If you make labels and booklets for all 5 CDs in the pack you order (5 sets of prints * $6 = $30), this whole project would be $60 ($20 drive + $10 cds + $30 prints), or $12 per CD. That’s still cheaper than their price straight from the store, pre-shipping!

For the basic CD and case, you'll need:

The data on the CD itself (Part 1)

Design & format (Part 2), then print & assemble (Part 3) the case decoration - back cover, lyric booklet

There's also a gift set for the 1st round of CDs - see what's in it by clicking any album on this official page, or watch waterfudge’s Ra*bits or Ryuseitai unboxings - for which you’ll also need these tutorials, since here we’re just focusing on the CD:

Box (Coming soon - I’ll just be adjusting the digipak template & tutorial from A Crafter In Training, like I did in the case decoration post)

Photo booklet (Coming soon - again, just adjusting the lyric booklet tutorial from the case decoration post)

Acrylic standee (Coming soon - but really it’s just shrink plastic, using these tutorials combined: Shrink Plastic for Beginners, Naruto & Sasuke Standee, and anything I learn from trying to make one myeslf)

CD Tutorial directory // Part 1 (burning the CD) - here // Part 2 (designing booklet & back cover) // Part 3 (printing & assembly)

Supplies:

CD disc drive. If your computer (or one you have access to, I borrow my grandma’s when I visit lol) has a CD disc drive, great! If not, this project will be a bigger investment for you. Search around to find an external disc drive you can plug into your computer via USB - cheap ones look to be around $20 on EBay, NewEgg, what have you.

Blank CD(s). Easiest way is to buy them online, or see if you have some packed away at home (either blank ones that were never used, or any that say CD-RW or “rewritable”). I don’t think there’s any way to rewrite commercial CDs (like an old unwanted album you have lying around) but I’m not 100% sure.

Jewel case - not slim jewel case. Ideally you find your CD(s) in a jewel case already, but if you don’t, you can buy them online or grab one from the thrift store. In the Album Series set, the official has a “standard double” case (with a third pane of plastic between the front and back, with the music CD on the front and the bonus CD on the back), but I didn’t bother with that since I didn’t think I’d be able to find those bonus interviews to rip and I wouldn’t understand them anyway.

Playlist. Here’s the official discography page which has all the CDs that exist and which songs are on them, and the wiki discography page which isn’t always updated but has more info (higher-res album covers, translated lyrics, etc). If you’re making your lyric booklet with English lyrics, you’ll have room for an odd number of songs (unless you glue pages together or something).

Step 0: If your CD isn’t blank, either erase it - here’s a WikiHow (for Mac and Windows) - or move the files somewhere else (I moved my family photos to a flash drive).

Step 1: Download songs - tutorial for downloading MP3s from SoundCloud here. You might not always be able to find the ones you want - SoundCloud is the best place for finding EnStars songs, but things get taken down for copyright. Karaoke (カラオケ) versions are a little hard to find, audio dramas are harder, but I’ve seen both around. Try searching the English and Japanese versions of song titles, and looking through EnStars/Unit playlists for tracks that have purposefully misspelled or random names. Also make sure you’re downloading the long versions (~3-5 minutes) instead of the game-length versions (~1-3 minutes) if possible. I had to go back and burn the CD again because one of my songs was the short version on accident…

Step 2 (Optional): Edit ID3 tags. To make the song titles and such display when you play the CD, you need to edit the ID3 tags. Tutorials:

Mac (album art & text tags)

Windows (album art)

Windows (text tags)

You can find this info on the wiki page for the album that song is in, from here. For the album covers, make sure you click the image and then “Open original” to get the highest res possible. I don’t know how the official CDs organize their ID3s, but I listed the lyricist & unit as the artist, and the composer & arranger as composer.

If your song album isn’t on the wiki, you can find these credits by searching the official page for 作詞 (lyricist), 作曲 (composer), and 編曲 (arrangement). If one person did multiple jobs the titles might be listed together (ex. 作曲·編曲). You can search their name on the wiki to see how it’s romanized in credits for another CD they worked on, if you want that.

Step 3: Burn the CD • Windows version • Mac version (you’ll only need the next minute or so of this, it goes on to talk about recording multiple at a time for artists producing their own CDs but we don’t need that)

CD Tutorial directory // Part 1 (burning the CD) // Part 2 (designing booklet & cover) - here // Part 3 (printing & assembly)

Official references (skip if designing your own)

Here's a quick reference for what the different series' album covers look like:

It’s hard to find pictures of the actual CD cases, so imitating the official will mean a lot of winging it. Flex your creative muscles and design a cool album layout! At the moment (July 2022), here’s some image references I can find for different series. Yes it favors my favs.

Unit CD series:

Spines for 1st Unit series, and outer spine band

Front and back for 1st Unit series, Ryuseitai

Spines for 2nd Unit series (with the spine band)

Front view of 3rd Unit series for Ryuseitai and Knights (no outer spine band, but spine is hard to see)

Front & CD, 3rd series Ryuseitai and Knights - shows how certain accents are in a separate plastic layer, and the image & color background is on the booklet itself

Front of Crazy:B and Alkaloid, inside of Crazy:B

Back of Crazy:B

Album series - see here, or watch waterfudge’s Ra*bits or Ryuseitai unboxings

Anime & Idol Song series:

Front view of the 4 most recent series (Anime, Idol Song season 1, Fusion units, Idol Song season 2)

Spines for Anime series

Front view of all Idol Song Season 1 cases (with outer spine band)

Inside & CD for various Idol Song season 1 series

Full detail of Idol Song season 2 Crazy:B

Shuffle unit series:

Front & art print, set 1 (AtoZ, XXVeil, Branco)

Front, Branco and back of set 1

Front & art print, set 2 (Getto Spectacle, Ring.A.Bell, La Mort)

I found these by scrolling through a lot of image search results for “あんさんぶるスターズ! CD”, sometimes with a unit/series name. Here’s the series names in Japanese for easy copy-pasting:

Unit CD (replace the [] with 一, 二, or 三; for Crazy:B or Alkaloid, replace it with “Extra”) - ユニットCD第[]弾

Album series - アルバムシリーズ

Anime series - TVアニメシリーズ

Idol Song series - ESアイドルソング and add “season 1” or “season 2”

Shuffle unit series - シャッフルユニットソング

Fusion unit series - “FUSION UNIT SERIES” is written in English

Design tutorial

Pretty much just watch A Crafter In Training - if you want the same tutorial I followed (there’s other ones for slip cases, CD jackets, all kinds of customization), watch this video in particular. Here’s some tips I found while testing:

The template from this video is huge (1000 dpi). EnStars rips are not. I made new templates at 350 dpi - download them here.

On that note, construct patterns yourself, find high-res versions of imaes with Google image search, and upscale with waifu2x if you like that look (I preferred upscaling right in my art program, felt crisper)

Use this website to help make sure your text will be readable. I went for at least 6.00, and it’s easy enough for me to read (using Montserrat, 6pt).

Lyric booklet specific tips:

Optional: If you have an even number of spreads and you’re done with lyrics, make another spread - maybe full character profiles, CGs, your art, “ads” for other merch you’ve made or will make...

English lyrics take up more space, so each song will be 2 pages at least.

Decide on your formatting standards ahead of time. When there’s multiple voices for a line, should it use & or /? Spaces between (Rinne / Niki:) or not (Rinne/Niki:)? When there are multiple lines by the same voice, do you repeat the label each line or only put a label when the singer changes?

CD Tutorial directory // Part 1 (burning the CD) // Part 2 (designing booklet & cover) // Part 3 (printing & assembly) - here

Printing

Check the options at your local print shop services, but my only option for double-sided prints (I’m pretty sure…) was regular old document copy prints. The quality was way nicer than my printer would've gotten, and they're a little stiff & matte for that nice professional feel.

Also, a good Step 0 would be to order a test print - two pages, double-sided, with a ruler (maybe use an image of a ruler and fit it to measure the 11 inch edge) - to make sure it'll flip on the long edge and not the short edge, and to see if the image will be resized at all before printing. Mine shrunk and my stuff didn't quite fit.

Check the print size (ex. 8.5 by 11 inch) and make a new art document with these dimensions and the same dpi you used for everything else (if you used my templates, that’s 350dpi).

Copy & paste each layer over from your back cover and booklet documents into this new document. Put them all in a folder, and with the folder selected, drag them all to the center (the more bleed you add to the edges, the less centered you have to be, but be a precise as you can).

To create the actual printable document (since I needed a .doc or .pdf to have multiple pages), I exported each page/layer as a .bmp, then inserted them into a Word document (with text that was just . every 30 lines or so to make sure I had enough pages). Right-click on each image, and under Wrap Text, choose In Front of Text, and uncheck Move With Text / choose Fix Position of Image. Move & resize it to take up the entire page, exactly. Make sure they’re in the right order. If you’ll be printing double-sided on the long edge (I think this is usually the case), rotate every other page 180 degrees.

Assembly

Again, Crafter In Training covered this, but I have some notes:

I recommend finding something smooth and round - a dowel, sharpie, or anything rounded - and using that to smooth out the fold in your booklet instead of your fingers. It’s straighter and cleaner that way.

I didn’t end up needing tape? I’m not sure what I did differently from the tutorial but i just stacked them all together and folded it down the middle and I was able to hold it together myself. Maybe this was hubris and I shouldn’t be telling you this but it worked fine for me, so.

If your stapler doesn’t open and can’t reach to the center of your booklet, use the stapler very lightly to mark where the holes would be and punch holes in them with a pin. (Pretend there's the front & back cover showing here, I ended up pasting mine on after because printing problems)

[Alt text: closed booklet with faint dots on the spine from where the stapler was used, then a pin being pushed through the spine center on the front of the booklet]

Then you slide it all together, and you're done! I didn't make a spine cover, but I would have just attached it with double-sided tape (weakened with your arm like in the tutorial video, probably). Also my back cover is off, because I didn't get a test print to check for shrinkage, and I didn't bother trying again lol.

original part 2 for comparison

RythLin:

NewDi:

original part 1 for comparison

StarPro:

CosPro:

aka PA shots, pashacolle/pashacore/pashakore, bromides, etc. EnStars format, suggest other versions if you're interested!

TLDR: Create an image with as many frames as will fit using the measurements below. Add card images and either signature images (both on the wiki) or name text in Futura 10.5pt with text spacing upped to 1. Get it printed on photo paper (at your local print shop, or buy photo paper for your printer) -

At CVS, the most cost-effective size was 12in x 8in, 9 cards for $5 ($0.55 per card) and that's what I used here

UPDATE: If you have your own printer and can use photo paper, that'll be cheaper per unit (try partially used packs on ebay too if you won't use the whole pack), more like $0.10 per card. 4x6 template coming soon since that's the cheapest kind

Long version: