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October 31, 2006

software

Disco Beta First Impressions

Posted Oct. 31, ’06, 10:56 AM PT by Pat Nakajima
Category | Software

Disco AppAs promised, I went ahead and grabbed the beta of Disco. After a night of CD burning on a scale of unprecedented magnitude (for me at least), I think I’ve gained enough experience with the app to give my opinions some credibility. What follows are some of my initial impressions of the app.

Keep in mind that this is a beta. Some of the negative attributes I’ve mentioned may go away, or at least be minimized by the time the app reaches its final stage.

So, without further ado, here’s the good, the bad, and the rest.

The Good:

  • Disc Images: Creating and burning disc images is incredibly easy. The drag and drop interface works marvelously. To create an image, you just drop the files into the app and click “Image.” To burn an image, you just drop the image into the app and click “Burn.” It doesn’t get much simpler than that. Creating an image from an existing disc is very easy as well.
  • Multi-disc Burns: If you’re looking to burn a job that will extend over multiple discs, Disco makes this process a snap. Not that it’s exceedingly difficult with other apps, but Disco just goes the extra mile to make it very simple.
  • Visual Luster: Disco’s visual splendor meets the hype, and then some. Unlike Toast, it’s clearly an app that could only live in OS X. To call its appearance “fluid” would attribute a far greater deal of chunkiness to it than what I’ve seen. A better term might be “aqua-lubriescent” (I’m far less concerned with the fact that this isn’t an actually a real word than I am with adequately describing this app.)
The Bad:
  • Audio CDs: Burning audio CDs could have been better. First, support for drag and drop from iTunes would be nice. Second, dragging a bunch of audio files into Disco will throw them into a random order. You’ll have to manually rearrange them to get the proper order. This is no small task due to the app’s tiny window and its propensity to auto-scroll at all the worst times.
  • Video Support:I had some difficulties burning video files to a format that my dvd player could read. Difficulties as in it couldn’t be done. This is a feature that Toast offers, and I could see being far more useful than “Discography”, which catalogs all of the jobs you do.
  • Visual Luster:Not all is well in visual-land. The heavily featured “smoke effects” chugged like Beelzebub on my Powerbook’s ATI 9600. There’s no support at all for Macs with integrated graphics. These make up most of the sales for Mac laptops. So basically, any consumer with a Macbook, iBook, or Mac Mini is left in the dust (“real-time particle effect”-free dust at that).
All in all though, it’s a pretty spiffy addition to my applications folder. I disabled the smoke effects, since their only real merit is their impressive nature. The audio shortcomings don’t fluster me so much, since iTunes 7 added the only missing feature to its burning capabilities, as far as I was concerned, which was CD-TEXT. While Disco’s simplicity is nice, it also limits the app’s flexibility. At the end of the day, Disco is a nice lightweight app for lightweight disc burning/ripping jobs.


1 Comments

intrigueBlue said:

iBooks and G4 Mac Minis don't have integrated graphics ;)

Personally, I find smoke distracting, so I'm tempted to turn it off. I can't comment on the other negatives, though, since I never burn anything but data DVDs/CDs. Image support is far more important for me, and Disco has already surpassed Toast in that regard.

November 17, 2006 12:16 PM

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