May, 2006

By: Daniel East

CD and DVD burning is a fairly standard thing these days, but what if you need to present something you’ve burned as a marketing tool, a personal gift, a music CD to sell or promote yourself or just want a nice looking package for your own collection? There are a few options out there, but BeLight Software presents one that is simple to use and creates great looking output that includes jewel box liners, flat panel covers and the discs, themselves.

Employing the BeLight interface used in many of their products (Business Card Composer, Swift Publisher), Disc Cover has the ability to use the elements from iLife applications. It can be as easy as selecting the right template from a huge range of styles and layouts, choosing the content (from iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD and even Toast Titanium) that imports the titles directly to the application, and customizing a few elements to your own taste.

Disc Cover includes printing templates for both labels and paper options of many types and, like other BeLight products, carries a huge clip art library. One of the things I found excellent was the range of images that includes some unusual instruments and microphones that might otherwise be hard to find. Images have transparent backgrounds (Alpha) and can have multiple levels overlay to created original looking designs to serve any and all of the purposes mentioned above.

I would like to have the ability to have a rotate shortcut in addition to using the Inspector controls. I would enjoy being able to create a cohesive package using ALL of BeLight’s applications so that they have the same theme – it is close, but being able to have the disc match the newsletter, match the business card, match the letterhead, etc., etc., would be excellent. Further, it would be fun to have the ability to create more stylized text (embossed, 3D, inner/outer glow, etc.) in Disc Cover; however, this is a lot of product for the very affordable price of just $34.95US for the download edition.

While this is definitely a consumer application, it is capable of producing very good quality output from your own printer that stands up to nearly any other product of this type and is far easier to use. For professionals, you may find yourself inspired by some of the layout templates and enjoy the ease of use from this product. Further, if you Mac supports OS X 10.3 or later, you can use Disc Cover and start creating packaging for your CDs and DVDs with inspiration at no extra charge.

Disc Cover costs US$34.95 for an electronic download or $39.95 CD that includes the full clipart library

System requirements: Mac OS X 10.3 or later

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10

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