DiscBlaze 6.1.5 — A Disc Burning Alternative to Apple’s Offerings

reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad

Developer: Radical Breeze webmaster@radicalbreeze.com   http://www.radicalbreeze.com/blaze/index.shtml Shareware   $30 USD           File Size: ca. 600 KB Version Posted: 19th April 2006. Try to Buy: You can download a fully functional free trial version (limited to 5 burns) prior to registration. Requirements: G4 or better, Mac OS X 10.4 or later (PPC or Intel), an OS X compatible CD or DVD burner. (If your CD/DVD burner works with iTunes or the Finder it will work with DiscBlaze.) The product is Universal Binary compliant. Audience: All levels of user with simple media burning needs
The software was tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM running under OS X 10.4.6.
Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Strengths: Rewritten in Apple’s Cocoa application development environment for OS X Tiger, DiscBlaze 6.0 features a more new user-friendly redesigned user interface. On top of that, the software is fast and flexible and the new interface is easier to use than the old.

Weaknesses: It isn’t Toast, but I’m not paying Roxio’s price either. In addition, the interface for making copies of CDs was awkward and time consuming.

Introduction

Since I burn many data CDs and DVD’s and make many audio samples with material I my extensive music collection, I am always in the lookout for tools for burning these archive volumes. May of our readers also are concerned about cost, so therefore a product that would meet their needs at a price lower then that for the genre leader would save them some money. I use Roxio’s Toast http://www.roxio.com/en/products/toast/index.jhtml, a $79 dollar product, having gotten my fist copy with my LaCie Burner – I’m used to it and am willing to afford the upgrades. [It’s an old dog, new tricks thing!]

Mike Swope of macCompanion last reviewed in an article entitled “DiscBlaze 3.02: Shareware Data CD/DVD & Audio CD Burning Software for Mac OS X Jaguar and Panther” in March 2004, Volume 2 Issue 3. At that time, Mike gave DiscBlaze a 4.0 macC’s. Let me quote briefly from Mike’s Review.

“Since the introduction of CD/DVD burning in the Mac OS Finder, it might be thought that disk burning applications are slowly being forgotten. But as we've seen with the continued popularity and development of Roxio® Toast®, long the defacto standard for burning CDs and DVDs on Macintosh, there is still room for improvement in disk-burning tools. Some shareware developers, despite Toast's dominance, believe they too can improve upon the process of disk burning and create better value. Radical Breeze Software is one such developer.”

I recommend that readers check out Mike’s review, since many of the items about DiscBlaze he discusses are still relevant, despite the fact that the developer has done much to enhance the product, again a sort of race with Toast Titanium, now version 7.0.2. The article also serves as a great way for a user new to burning CDs and DVDs to get oriented to the process.

Since it’s been a long time, from a Macintosh OS and competitive products perspective, between version 3.0.2 to 6.1.5, I decided to do a quick check to see how well the software fared with the Tiger OS X operating system. I know that there is still another competitive product out there; Dragon Burn a $49 product from NTI which is more highly oriented toward video and live audio recording than DiscBlaze. http://www.ntius.com/default.asp?p=dragonburn/dburn4_main but that’s for another review.

[Note, whenever possible, I don’t use iTunes, so have no concerns about the interoperability of DiscBlaze with Apple’s music software. Neither do I use the Macintosh OS X burn from the desktop feature. I don’t do video either, so burning home or downloaded movies are not my thing.]

Using the Product/Features

Like all good software, installation is a breeze. Having used other Radical Breeze software products, the product follows most Macintosh conventions and its interface will be familiar to anyone who’s burned CDs and DVDs. [In my experience, but not directly for this product, Radical Breeze both listens to user problems when they occur and responds to them! — Are you listening Microsoft?]

Although I’ve played with the software for a few days, I did not put it through its complete paces. I found that all but one of my critical burning tasks, worked well with DiscBlaze. My burning needs are straight forward, and I commonly use Toast in meeting those needs. In particular, the interface for making backups of folders and files only, was close enough to what I was familiar with that I had virtually no learning curve.

However, burning back up copies of CDs turned out to be a significant problem. I could easily create disk images from the finder or by using DiscBlaze, to make fill with audio tacks for my samplers. For this I used audio tracks ripped from CDs. However, in DiscBlaze, that had to be done by dragging, into the main DiscBlaze window, the tracks one tune at a time. True even when I wanted more than one track from a CD.

The product’s instructions say… Just insert a blank disc (choose Ignore if OS X asks you what to do with it), and then drag files or folders into the DiscBlaze window to add them to the disc. Well some times.

Data Disks — DiscBlaze lets you select from four data disc formats -- Mac, PC, Mac And PC Hybrid, and ISO 9660. For data CDs or DVDs, if you select the appropriate format from a pop-up menu you will burn the disk to that format. (No help is provided for the newbie on this selection task). If you select the Hybrid format and then select an item in the window and click on the File Info button, you can choose whether to make the item visible on a Mac, a PC, or both. In other words, you can create CDs that show up one way on one platform, and another way on the other.

To make the instructions work for data, I had to reset my computer so that Toast was not the default application when a blank CD was installed. [Preferences > CDs and DVDs. — Either iTunes or DiscBlaze as the default application would do.] That took a few times around, and several useless disk burns, to figure out. There was nothing in the minimal help files to point out this potential problem. [More about the help files later] Most Macintosh users have iTunes set up as the default, err, by default.

Burn-Baby Burn, Perhaps — If you want to burn music CDs and DVDs you choose between mp3 and standard audio {AIFF formatted.} The range in quality is too large, an in between point is needed to add choice between large files and audio quality.

Back to burning a copy of my CD for backup purposes — When trying to burn a copy of a CD I first expect to choose whether the product is a data CD or an Audio CD (or DVD). Than I expect to be able to drag that disc, either audio or data, to the main window of an application (e.g., Toast) and see the content displayed, ready for me to either burn or rearrange. This does not happen in DiscBlaze! There is no way to set the output type prior to adding the CD to the right hand window. Since the default setting for the program is Mac (HFS+), prior to you changing the product’s preference pane. In that setting of course, I can see all the tracks but any burn made in that setting will not play on a CD player. However, you knew that, didn’t you?

Okay, moving to Audio selection on the pull down menu, I get a blank contents window. All the tracks have disappeared. I could not figure out how to add, all at once, the contents of the Audio CD into the left hand side of the application window. What did work was grabbing the tracks one at a time and dragging them each to the contents window (right side of screen). Excuse the pun — what a drag! Had I selected mp3 from the pull down menu I would have gotten all the tracks to appear at once, but mp3s are too low in sound quality.

To make a long story short, after I slept on it, I tried once again to do a three step audio CD duplication, nope — didn’t work. [Select Audio, Select Tracks at once, burn the backup CD.]

Well, now to the features that are advertised on the developer’s web site – A few observations for this mini-review.

And the Vendor Notes

•   Burn CDs and DVDs with a variety of options. Multiple sessions, test burns and more. Create and re-use disc layouts. — This worked fine for data CDs and one data DVD
•  Use custom icons for Mac (HFS+) discs — I hate the generic look, and sung available clipart, custom icons worked well for me.
• Get information on the type of media your drive supports. — Yes that worked but since I have an internal and external firewire burner, I could not tell which was which from within DiscBlaze.  
• Burn and create new disc images in a variety of industry standard formats  (.dmg's, .cdr's and .iso's). – Okay, that’s fine for data archive media.
• Erase and re-use your CD-RW discs – I don’t use CD-RW disks, but the feature worked the one time I tried it.
• Set details on individual files including Hybrid (PC and Macintosh) options, enabled status and comments. – I didn’t chase this.
• Burn data CD's and DVD's in HFS+, Joliet, ISO-9660 and UDF formats. – I didn’t test this feature.
• Burn Audio CD's and assign each track a custom pre-gaps. — I had enough troubles trying to duplicate audio CDs that gaps were the last thing on my mind.

A Few More Gripes

Lack of Detailed Help Files – neither the product help feature or the publishers web site had information that would have helped me to figure out how to duplicate audio CDs. Indeed, when I tried to update the help files, I was passed to a screen that required me to provide the details for my internal modem. Hmmm, I use a high-speed Internet cable connection that is always on. Somehow, the software neither recognized the available connection, not allowed me to manually enter it.

Audio Track Information — The screen containing audio information contains file size, not time. That might work for data, but not audio, Let’s get real folks! Music tracks are measured in time, not MB.

Conclusions

After reading both Mike Swope’s review and the information provided on the Radical Breeze website, I expect a good if not great product. Not another Toast, but a product that most of us could easily use to duplicate audio CDs, create audio samples, and make archive data files of either CD or DVD media. To say the least, I was disappointed. Working with data was straightforward, but audio, to say the least was a drag. 

If any of you readers have the secret short-cut to making a copy of an audio CD in three steps (select output format, add content and burn.) let me know, and I can get it to work, I’ll post an addendum to this review. Meanwhile the Toast is burning and I love it. With regret, I must rate this product 3.0 macCs.