April, 2006

By: Mark Starlin

	Publisher BeLight Version 1.0.8 Type Commercial Street Price CD version: $39.95 + S&H; Download version: $34.95 Requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later.
	Rating: 9.0 Intended Function: 10 Ease Of Use: 9 User Interface: 10 Documentation: 6 Features: 10 Value: 9
	Available At BeLight

The iLife suite of applications has made creating digital content possible for everyday Mac users. Editing videos and burning them to a DVD is fairly easy and enjoyable. Creating a “mix” CD with iTunes or a CD of your own GarageBand tunes is also a snap. And since you can get quality results from iLife applications, it is a shame to use a “Sharpie” to label the finished products. With this in mind, BeLight brings the same ease of use and quality results we expect from iLife to creating digital media labeling.

Overview

Disc Cover helps you create labels for CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, mini CDs, and Business Card mini CDs. If your printer supports it, Disc Cover will print directly on printable CD and DVDs. In addition, Disc Cover lets you create CD and DVD inserts and booklets. It includes a wealth of controls for modifying images and text and includes a large library of photographs and clipart.

In Use

There are two ways to create a design in Disc Cover — from scratch, or by using a ready-made template. When you open Disc Cover, you are greeted with the assistant window, which is a collection of ready-to-use templates (around 70.) These can be used as is, or as starting points for further modification. There are a large number of attractive designs available. However, the coolest feature is how the templates interact with the iLife suite of applications. If you select a music template, the assistant takes you to your iTunes library where you can select a playlist. The titles of the songs are then automatically added to the design. If you are creating a photo DVD design, the assistant takes you to your iPhoto library where you can select images, which are then incorporated into the design along with the titles. Slick. The only thing I found lacking was the ability to use iDVD “themes” as designs in Disc Cover.

The Disc Cover Assistant

While templates are quick and easy, the more adventurous will want to create their own designs from scratch. Disc Cover comes with plenty of powerful tools to make this easy also. I’ll describe the tools as I take you through the interface.

Design Canvas

The main work area of Disc Cover is called the design canvas. It is a sizeable window with tool buttons on the top and a “source panel” on the right side. There are five buttons at the top of the source panel that allow you to access content for your design. The Music button takes you to your iTunes library; the Photo button takes you to your iPhoto library; the Video button takes you to your Movies folder; the Data and Files button allows you to select any file on your Mac; and the Clipart button gives you access the included Disc Cover clipart.

The top of the design canvas has buttons for basic drawing tools, text tools, and access to the font, color, and “inspector” window – which I’ll cover next. There is also a button to toggle between design and preview modes. The design canvas has two layers — foreground and background — which are selected using tabs, at the bottom of the window.

The Disc Cover interface.

The Inspector Is In

The Inspector window is where you select design elements — CD, booklet, insert, etc. — and access controls for modifying elements of your design. There are six buttons at the top of the Inspector window.

The Design Element button allows you to select the type of design (CD, DVD booklet, etc.) you want to work on and select the paper or label type to be used. I tested Disc Cover with the Memorex CD & DVD LabelMaker kit (which, naturally, came with Windows software only.) By selecting the Paper button, and then selecting Memorex from the resulting list of label manufacturers, I was able to select any of the Memorex labels in my kit. The label then appeared in the design canvas so I could see exactly what I was about to print.

The Geometry button lets you position, scale, and rotate elements of your design. It also gives you access to additional controls for the included “smart shapes” vector images. For example, you can control the amount of curve on a rounded rectangle, or the number of sides on a star.

The Fill & Shadow button allows you create shadows and to adjust fill and line thickness, color, and opacity.

The Image button allows you to tint, mask, and tile images. There is large collection of masks, which allow you create nice effects such as adding ragged edges to photos. You can also add tint to photographs and adjust their opacity.

The text button allows you to control text spacing, alignment, color, etc. It also has a button to bring up the Font window to select typefaces, size, etc.

The alignment button allows you to align objects to each other or in a circular pattern to fit the CD.

Clipart

Disc Cover comes with a collection of over 23,000 clipart images on CD. If you choose the download version of Disc Cover, you get about 900 images. The content ranges from photographs to illustrations to line art. It is organized into several categories to make finding an image somewhat easier, and there is a search box to narrow things down even further. The images range from high quality to the type of images you find in “mega” clipart collections. I usually found a number of items suitable for the design I was working on, although I would have preferred more background images over the multitude of “items” such as typewriters, telephones, antelope heads, etc. Of course, you can always import any other image you have on your hard drive if you can’t find something in the included clipart that meets your needs.

The printing window

Documentation

The only documentation included with Disc Cover is the Help file available from the Help menu. It covers the application adequately, but is a hassle to use, as you always have to go back to the index to access another page. A pdf version would be a major improvement.

Printing

I printed several different types of Memorex labels using a HP Photosmart 8450 inkjet printer, and they all came out perfectly. No fussing with margins or alignments, it just worked correctly every time. Impressive. Images and text looked great. Photos looked like they were printed on plain paper – acceptable but not overly impressive. Results will vary depending on the labels used. I didn’t have a printer capable of printing directly onto CDs, so I couldn’t test that feature.

Final Thoughts

Disc Cover is a great “completer” application for iLife. It has an intuitive interface, many powerful tools, tight integration with iLife, and makes creating great looking labels and inserts a snap. If you are looking for an easy way to make your CDs and DVDs look as good as their content, Disc Cover is a great way to go.

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