The Processor

Below is Disco burning a disc.

Intrigued? Well, read on.

Once in a while a program comes along that makes you feel good about doing pretty mundane tasks on your computer. It’s a good thing that such programs are in abundance on the Mac scene. Today I’d like to highlight a recent purchase of mine, a CD/DVD burning program called Disco.

On the surface, Disco is a disc burning/imaging application but don’t let such a simple description fool you. Not only does Disco ooze with style, it comes with excellent features such as Discography and Spandex. Since I like those two features the most (barring the Smoke feature), I’ll give you a brief run-down of what they are.

Discography: It’s simple, all it does is keep track of all the files you’ve burned on a disc (or archived in a disc image) by creating a local searchable index. This prevents you from going through your discs one by one trying for example to figure out which disc you backed up that beautiful sunset photograph on. Obvious, but powerful.

Spandex: If you’ve for example got a whole slew of photos lying around on your Mac from that nature photography course you took and they don’t fit on a single disc, Disco calculates how many discs you need prior to starting the authoring process (Disco assumes you’re going to be using one type of media). This allows you to gather the number of suggested discs or remove some photos to ensure all of them fit on a single disc. Subtle but thoughtful.

The user interface (UI) is pretty slick although it’s pretty out-of-sync with most Mac applications I’ve seen. Furthermore, the UI progresses with a series of choices…kinda hard to explain, but it’s something I’m not really that used to and I think it’s going to take a while before I start feeling more comfortable with it.

So, there you have it. Disco.