Ask TUAW

February, 2007

By: Mat Lu

Pepe asks

I have a bunch of "backup" music cds at home but they don't look nice on the shelf like that. I went to Staples to buy labels (probably these, http://www.worldlabel.com/Pages/wl-ol5075.htm) to print out "spines." ... There are a bunch of cd label printing solutions out there for the Mac. They all seem to be about printing nice fancy cd labels with nice fancy templates and backgrounds but I haven't found any yet for printing the actual spine. I realize that it's tricky with the billion different label manufactures out there and all, but still. I also checked within iTunes. There doesn't seem to be a way to export album information for printing.

Well, first of all I'm not entirely sure why you want to use spine label stickers. If you look at your regular full-size commercial CD cases you'll see that the plastic case is in three parts: the cover, an inner case part that the CD itself clips into and and an outer clear part that the inner case snaps into. Now there's a paper insert between the (generally) black CD holder and the outer case. To make professional looking CDs you should print out your own inserts, fold them, and insert those between inner case and the outer case. That way you don't have to deal with spine labels which wouldn't look particularly good in my opinion, and besides I would imagine they are pretty hard to apply straight anyway.

So the best program for making those inserts is probably BeLight Software's Disc Cover. While I haven't used Disc Cover myself, I have used other BeLight products and been very impressed with them. In fact, according to BeLight you can "create custom layouts for unsupported paper stock" with Disc Cover, so you might even be able to use your own labels if you insist.

In addition, the link you provide includes PDF templates that can be modified with something like Adobe Illustrator, so that's a possible solution if you really want to use the labels.

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