With Disc Cover from Belight, you can design great CD/DVD labels and everything that goes with these, such as booklets and tray inserts for jewel boxes, in a simple and efficient manner. Disc Cover comes with a large number of designed templates that you can either use as they are or as a foundation to create your own design. With Disc Cover you don’t have to fiddle with label measurements; it’s all taken care of for you.

Disc Cover has a nice interface. It looks slick and modern, and very much in tune with Mac OS X Tiger. By default, Disc Cover opens in Assistant mode. This mode lets you select pre-defined design and enables you to create a label, insert and booklet in a quick and no-nonsense manner. But most of the people who make an effort to buy Disc Cover will do so because they want to design their own labels and booklets. Disc Cover has great support for them as well.

A CD or DVD burned with your images, a movie, or simply your daily backup need not look boring. When you’re in a hurry, the marker is close by and it’s easier to just rapidly note what’s on the disc than it is designing a label. That’s true, but even in those circumstances creating a label that has some useful information and is automatically updated as items in the data folder change, is better than the marker.

From Boring Text To Flashy Design

As designs can be saved, you can create a design only once, and then print your label whenever you need it. Disc Cover allows you to do that as well as import your iTunes Playlists, iPhoto photo rolls and iDVD movies. Updating a list is as easy as selecting the folder (or Playlist, roll, etc) again after reopening the label file and selecting the changed folder or even just add or remove the files that have changed since the last print session.

Disc Cover starts with only a label template for you to fill in. There are two layers available: a background and a foreground. It would be nice to have more layers in a future version, because two layers can be a bit skimpy when you’re trying out different designs. More layers allow you to save various design elements and various complete designs that can be turned on or off as required.

The label is the basic design component in Disc Cover, but is really easy to add a tray insert and a booklet — and more. You just click the “Add Page” icon and a list pops up in which you can select the design component you want, including VHS labels, tray inserts, mini-CD labels and your own custom design components. Adding design components is very intuitive.

Adding Design Elements To A Component

Adding an image, clip art or shapes is just as intuitive. You can add images from iPhoto, from files on your disk, clip art from the built-in clip art collection, and shapes — which are called ‘smart shapes’, but I don’t really see why these are smart. Shapes can be manipulated much the same way as you would manipulate them in Freehand (not Illustrator!). They can be changed and edited using the Inspector window. However, positioning a shape or an image in an exact location wasn’t as easy as I would have liked it.

For example, you can’t hold a key combination while dragging a shape so that it will grow from the centre out. I found that centering is done by snapping the shape to an invisible grid. That’s not as intuitive as I would like it to be. Adding an image to a design component is a matter of drag-and-drop from the resources well left of the main window. Images can be edited in a lot of exciting ways.

In fact, with Disc Cover comes the free version of Image Tricks (separate download) which enables you to apply Mac OS X Core Image filters. There are over 40 of them, and if you want more, you can upgrade Image Tricks to a 15 USD Pro version that comes with even more of these filters.

Together with Disc Covers’ many masks and the ability to fine-tune everything in the Inspector, you get a lot of image editing power that is not available — or at least not as easy to apply — in competing applications. The Core Image features of Disc Cover make it earn its place next to general applications such as Photoshop, and many designers won’t sneeze at using them.