Thu, 08 Feb 2007 Disco

Disco’s maker, Sofa, makes the bold claim that this is “the missing solution for disc burning on your Mac”. It’s not far wrong. Out of the box you get an audio CD burning tool in iTunes and data backup built into Finder. And Disco can do much more, within one attractive and deceptive interface. Unlike old-school CD- and DVD-burning tools like Nero, Disco is one simple, intelligent dialog and its animated interface changes contextually, presenting new options as and when you need them.

Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, the folks at Sofa trust you to organise your own files in Finder. To burn data to a disc simply launch Disco and drag and drop files to it. To copy a CD or DVD, insert a disc and click on Copy. Sofa boasts that you can make one-to-one copies in just two clicks.

Although simple, Disco supports a range of configurable disc formats, file systems and data types for different platforms and uses. You can burn from ISO, DMG, BIN or IMG disc image formats, create hybrid discs or target PCs with Joliet format. It’s also easy to create MP3 discs, audio CDs or data discs.

Disco’s extended features are the most impressive factor. The Discography function maintains a searchable database of every file you burn to disc: to find a single file in your backup collection, just search through Discography with a couple of clicks instead of trawling through disc after disc. Spandex automatically splits large backups over multiple discs. As you burn files the program spits out completed discs and prompts you to insert new ones.