Disco, a disc burning app, has received some of the best publicity a Mac app can get in recent years. So now that it’s in a near-final release, aka public beta (which you can download here!), was all of its hype accurate? Well… yes.
I AM having toast for breakfast. I abandoned Roxio’s Toast since version 6 came out, seeing it just wasn’t worth it anymore to pay one hundred bucks for a piece of software for burning discs. Sure, it may have new stuff now, but I still don’t need it since there are free alternatives to it (one hundred bucks are one hundred bucks). So I’ve been using the open source Burn alternative for a while now — until Disco came along.
It’s all in the looks. Disco has one of the most simplistic and attractive user interfaces out there — the black is very sexy, even with an added transparency effect. The added smoke eye-candy is especially neat. You can view it first-hand in this little video I found. And of course, all it takes to burn a disc is just a quick dragging of the desired files and a couple of clicks.
Burn, baby, burn! So far, it can burn various formats in either a CD or DVD — with promised support for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD when Apple goes for any (Apple’s going for Blu-Ray, last I checked). It can also copy discs, or create images of them. Perhaps the best feature is that if a file’s too big for a single disc, it can be split over several discs. It also features your very own Discography — the history file of all the discs you’ve burned. In a few words, Disco’s job is burning disks — and does it quite good.
Conclusion. Disco may lack some of the “pro” features from the latest version of Toast, but for the average user, this is the best option out there. You can get it for a limited time at fifteen bucks — twenty-five, after that. I guess this is the future of apps on the Mac platform: useful ones with a highly-attractive presentation. Gone are the days of boring disc burning sessions with Toast — welcome to Disco.
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[tags]Apple,Mac,Software,Disco[/tags]
carlos on October 30th, 2006 at 4:46 pm says:
what about burning DIVX/XVID to dvd’s? Does it convert them automaticly like TOAST?
fcodc on October 30th, 2006 at 5:25 pm says:
Nope, that’s one of the “pro” features I was talking about. Disco is only a disc burning app. But fortunately, there’s enough freeware out there that do that job quite easily.
rs2 on November 6th, 2006 at 1:02 pm says:
I think keeping simple can be the sucess key of this Disco, avoiding getting like Nero (i used on my PC XP) for example, a good tool but with lots of features, complex. I mensioned Nero because I am a recent switcher (came from XP world of almost 10 years on Microsoft developing tools), I was about to buy toast when found this Disco.
I think Disco is very nice.
fcodc on November 6th, 2006 at 2:25 pm says:
Congrats on the switch! Glad you like it so far.
m1ss1ontomars2k4 on January 2nd, 2007 at 2:02 am says:
just posted to see if you’d identify my browser wrong, since i changed the user-agent manually.
tman on February 14th, 2007 at 1:30 pm says:
I was wondering is it possible to copy a DVD movie like Star Wars? I had a program for windows that would remove the security and then allow me to copy a DVD. Will disco do this or do you know of any program that will?
fcodc on February 14th, 2007 at 3:05 pm says:
Disco isn’t capable of ripping DVDs. Although, other programs like HandBrake and MacTheRipper can. Both are featured in the Software page at the top. Oh, and be sure to rip only the content you own.