Disc Cover : CD Printing Review

April, 2007

By: DigMo!

Having owned a Canon Pixma printer for a few years now I have been impressed at ability of printing directly to the surface of a DVD or CD. The output is photo quality output and many of the DVDs could easily be passed off as a professional production. The only slight downside with the system was the printing software supplied by Canon, yes it does the job but it is not without limits.

Disc Cover by Belight software solves this problem perfectly. Disc Cover is a slick and intuitive Mac OS X software to create labels and covers for CDs, DVDs and more. Variety of professionally made designs are just fine for a quick start. The program imports data and images from iTunes, iPhoto, Finder, iDVD and many other sources. You can easily experiment with styles and graphic tools. Disc Cover will fairly serve to bring you more and more design ideas.

Disc Cover is capable of more than just printing CDs, Disc Cover prints any of the blue elements in the image below.

Templates:
Although I have never been a great fan of templates Disc Cover comes with over 90 professionally designed templates, a collection of 23,000+ images and 30+ photo-collages. You can apply more than 100 unique masks, fill text blocks with colors, easily handle transparency and circle text. Insert your own pictures in various supported formats. The Background and Foreground layers serve to implement the advanced design ideas.

Changing between the different element formats could not be easier, simply click on ‘change type’ on the drop down and the full list of elements will appear. Better still Disc Cover will automatically reformat the current screen and adapt your creation to the new element.

iLife Integration
Disc Cover will import images from iPhoto but possibly the most impressive feature is its ability to import a song list (and album art) from an iTunes playlist making it the ideal companion for iTunes CD creation. Recently I purchased an album from iTunes and I generally always produce a backup to CD. In just a few seconds I had not only imported the album art but also a full track listing of the CD in question :

For a list of compatible direct to CD printing : Click here.

If you own a printer capable of printing direct to CD then I would go as far as to say Disc Cover is an essential application! If your printer can not print directly to the surface of the a disc the application is definitely still worth looking at for producing custom CD and DVD inlays and covers.

Update :
Disc Cover can also create an index of a previously burned cd. I put a data cd I created last week in the drive and Disc Cover printed a full index. I now have a disc with a list of the contents nicely printed on the face ! Excellent !

For more on Disc Cover visit Belight Software.

DigMo! Rating:

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