Disco (USD $14.95 (intro price) USD $21.95 (regular price))

Website: discoapp.com

When I decided to switch to a Mac for my main machine, I knew that there would be a few applications I might have a hard time finding a good equivalent to. My main PC recently had a hard drive crash and there was no data back up. The incident made good burning software the foremost on the list. I spent some time on VersionTracker and Google looking for a solid freeware alternative to Nero’s Burning Suite for Windows. In the process I found some great applications like Burn that combined the burning features of OS X into a nice little program, but they lacked the feature I wanted the most: automatically splitting up large folders across multiple CDs. This may sound like a lazy man’s feature, but when you get to a certain point with your data it can become quite tedious to split the folders up manually.

I took a look at Toast and the only thing holding me back was the $99.99 (USD) price tag and lack of a free trial. Of course there is a $20 (USD) rebate at the moment, but it still wasn’t worth stopping my search there. I then remembered seeing a story on Digg a few weeks back about a new burning application for OS X. The attention it was receiving was about it’s beautiful interface that produces interactive smoke as your burn your CD. It is of course only a gimmick, but an incredibly beautiful demonstration of what your machine can do. The fact that Disco boasts all the basic features of most burning applications along with the good looks and it’s current $14.95 (USD) made it impossible to pass up the free trial.

Unfortunately the GUI is stripped of all it’s glory on my Mac Mini, as per the Intel GMA950’s lack of floating point texture support. However it split up the files perfectly and after double checking the data verification on the three DVDs I found no errors in the data. I purchased it immediately and have since burned several CDs and DVDs of data without one bad burn. The process is simple: drag the folder or folders into the application, get however many CD’s or DVD’s Disco tells you to have ready and click burn. Disco also has the capability of making images of your data or existing CDs in CDR, ISO, and DMG formats. You may want to note that developers have stated they are working on a non-interactive smoke interface for the GMA950 machines, so that’s something to look forward too.

Disco however lacks the features of a full burning suite like Toast, such as disc mounting, iLife integration, and the ability to make custom video DVDs. Keeping in mind that the application is in beta and is only a fraction of the price of it’s competition makes it difficult to criticize. It’s pretty clear from Disco’s website that they plan on making this a more capable program over the next few years, support for HD-DVD and Blu-ray are already on the list as soon as Apple supports them. All those things combined make Disco real competition for Toast users who don’t take advantage the more complex features.

I like to judge simplicity and usability by how easy it is for people like my parents to use the program. Disco seems tailored for this as it walks you through every step without talking to you like a you’re a geek, or talking down to you. Because of that my mother was able to back up her photo library with ease, and that’s saying a lot considering her very basic knowledge of computers. People like me will want to spend the money and upgrade to Toast eventually for the more advanced features. But if you’re a basic user or someone who just wants an easy way to back up your files periodically Disco does the job flawlessly.

For an audio review, see the December 15th, 2006 episode of The MacCast.