Disco Editor's Review

Disco is an easy to use DVD/CD burning tool.

The application interface is really cool. It's animated and easy to use. It also features a interactive burning effect of smoke which can be customized: 'smoke', 'fire', 'goo', 'icy' 'mist', 'purple haze', 'red sea' and 'steam'. Or you can make your own 'smoke'. It has an integrated motion sensor, interface transparency and sounds.

There are a lot of burning features packed into this small application, such as disk type, custom burn speed, multi-session, file based systems option (HFS+, UDF, PC Joliet, ISO 9660). Some of the features are quite new for a burning tool, such as "Discography", "Spanning" and "Imaging".

Discography helps you find previous created disks. It can automatically index all burnt media. Beside a burning tool is a perfect disk catalog.

Spanning is one of the features that is useful in handling large files. It detects the total files size and divides the files and asks for multiple disks to make everything fit.

Imaging is a feature that usually is available in a disk image creation program. The supported formats are IMG, ISO, DMG, CUE/BIN. Besides the back-up of disks I can make a '.iso' image, or any other supported image type. While creating the image I missed a progress bar. Testing the imaging option took some time to create a huge '.dmg' file with lots of files and folders within. A choice for the compression type would be nice.

I burned successfully my 2.5Gb 'test_files' directory. During the burning process, you can play with the 'smoke'. After the burning you can chose to automatically verify disk for: structure, positions, content, names, sizes and metadata. You can copy an unprotected disk or save its image on the local hard drive. You can also make audio CD's with files that aren't on your iTunes playlist. The application recognizes the file types and display an audio-CD or files-CD option.

Pluses: it has a cool interface, lots of animations and the smoke effect which turned out to be a delight effect for my eyes, disk image creation support, the catalog feature of the burned discs.

Drawbacks / flaws: it doesn't provide a confirmation dialog for erasing disks. I would like the application to adjust the speed list according to the inserted disk speed. The application doesn't have a progress bar while it creates the images.

In conclusion: great interface for the OS X built-in burning features, including disk catalog and imaging tool. If you're not completely happy after testing this program, you can try other burning software like: SimplyBurns, Burn, QuickBurn, or CD Session Burner.

version reviewed: 1.0.2