Disco Beta
October 24, 2006
I’ve been eagerly anticipating Disco for quite a while now. I’ve seen arguments dotted around the net from people whose view is that, we shouldn’t be paying for disc burning applications now, and further more, who wants an application that fills your screen with smoke!
Personally, I find the open source burning applications on OS X to be somewhat lacking and they aren’t that great to use. Equally, the in built method of burning discs in OS X works great, but isn’t the most elegant. Whilst Toast is pricey and way more than most people ever need!
Disco aims for that middle ground and fills it perfectly. The interface is slick and simple, drop your files on the app, press a button and you’re off. Creating discs in hybrid, joliet, HSF and other formats is supported and it only takes a few clicks to change your formatting preference. In fact, doing just about anything involving burning data to disc is easy using Disco but it does fall flat in one or two areas, most notably that you can’t erase a disc, something I find slightly annoying. Unless I’ve just missed the option somewhere.
During the burn process you can optionally choose to turn on the smoke feature (provided you have a dedicated graphics card that supports it) and the first few times you do, it looks cool. Blowing in your microphone and moving your mouse through it generates “wind” but after a little while I ditched it. A smoke filled desktop isn’t very useful and the smoke doesn’t really offer a lot of visual feedback anyway.
I’ve burnt a good 10-12 discs today (having a bit of a clean up) and they all burnt without a hitch. I forgot to mention the error checking is very thorough and is divided into sections for content, file size, names etc etc.
All in all it’s a superb app and I’ll be having myself a license ($14) as soon as it’s out of beta.
Feedback?
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