Disc Cover 2.x Labelling Software

May, 2008

By: Erik Vlietinck

Creating disc labels is easy with Disc Cover 2, but just as with discLabel, you can ask yourself the question whether Disc Cover would be used by professional designers. Just like Bryan Bedell, I don't believe designers will ever use tools that are primarily aimed at creating a design fast. But Disc Cover 2 does have a well balanced feature set and you can get good results with it.

Just as I did with discLabel last week, I asked Belight Software about their opinion of where and how Disc Cover is used. Helen Nersesova, Belight Software's PR lady answered them.

On the question whether she thinks Disc Cover can be described as professional designers' tool, she said: “Disc Cover is supplied with professionally design templates and prepared design elements (such as backgrounds and collages). So, it is great for people who want to quickly get colourful and professional looking discs with their music, photos and home video.” Contrary to the opinion of Bryan Bedell, though, she added: “On the other hand, due to its extensive editing tools, Disc Cover is an excellent solution for more advanced users too—those users who want to experiment and create their own/unique designs from scratch. And for professional designers we added creative tools (such as background image generators and Art Text support).”

Professionals Supported

Nersesova said some of Belight's support cases and messages from the BeLight forum indicate that professional designers find Disc Cover useful for their work. “Their questions usually concern sending their disc artwork to commercial printers, and support for direct printing of disc labels on CD/DVD duplicators,” she added.

According to Helen Nersesova the most appealing features of Disc Cover are that it is very intuitive to use. “People quickly learn how to work with it and thus they obtain the result they desired initially or even better. Also, it conveniently imports data from various sources (iTunes, Aperture, iPhoto, iDVD, Roxio Toast, audio discs and more). And users want us to create more and more design templates.”

The most wanted feature for Disc Cover seems to be professional CD/DVD duplicator support and more sophisticated image editing tools.

With those answers in the back of my head, I tested Disc Cover 2. What I found was a mature product for amateur designers. For example, there are ready-made collages, ready-made backgrounds, clipart and stock images. All of these are of excellent quality, but the professional or semi-pro, or even the amateur who likes to design will start his labels from scratch.

Commendable is the program's interface. It's clean, it?s simple and it works. What I like very much is the support for the Aperture library in addition to iPhoto. Text, shapes, masks, and effects all work well. The optionally downloadable Art Text plug-in (also usable as stand-alone program) is a nice and effective text styling application. It allows you to quickly create text effects.

Best Printer Calibration

The print and printer calibration set-up are among the best I?ve seen. In fact, there is only one thing that I don't like about Disc Cover: it only has two layers (Background and Foreground).

Disc Cover has discLabel (and to some degree, both have Discus) as its competitor. If I had to choose, I really wouldn't know which would be my favourite. discLabel has one distinct advantage: you can create your own printing page properties, but it's a bit of a drag to do so. On the other hand, Disc Cover played nice with the Dymo DiscPainter, and discLabel did not (yet).

In the end, I think the choice between the two is a matter of taste, but they're both excellent products. My personal preference currently goes to Disc Cover, because I find its interface a bit cleaner, its printer support just a tad better, and its results are equally fine

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