| Manufacturer: Apple Computer |
| Suggested Retail Price: $0 |
System Requirements:
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iTunes and Disc Burner are two applications that come together to play and organize MP3s, create Audio and Data CDs, and are the first true background burning applications for the Macintosh. These free applications work great, and are easy to use, taking over Toast and SoundJam in many people's households.Installation:
To install each piece of software, download them from here: iTunes, Disc Burner. Then, just run their respective installers, and restart (for Disc Burner). That's it. You may want to set up preferences the way you like in iTunes.
Usage:
| MP3 Playing (iTunes): |
One of the great things this window shows you is some very helpful ID3 tags. Unlike other programs, Apple uses the ID3 tags the way they are meant to be used. Editing them is done by option-clicking a song to bring up a contextual menu. From there, editing MP3 tags is as simple as choosing options, or filling in text. Then, once you have all your tags set up correctly, you can easily sort by title, artist, album, genre, and much more. This is by far the best way to organize MP3s that I have seen.
That's not the only great thing you will observe. iTunes supports "visuals" which are crazy colorful patterns that twist and turn to the music. You can run them at full screen, or in a window, add new ones, create your own, and fall asleep to them. Sure, they may not be the most useful thing in the world, but they are still fun to watch.
Now on to something a little more useful. When you pop in a commercial CD, iTunes will access the CDDB database, and try to find that CD. If it finds it, it will fill in song names, authors, album names, genres, and much more (nearly all of the ID3 tags). Then, when you go to import the songs (by simply pressing the Import button), everything will already be entered for you, and you can quickly put them in their respective playlists, or organize them however you like.
Another way iTunes utilizes the Internet is with streaming radio stations. Some people like to set up their own MP3 radio stations (sorry, iTunes does not support this yet), which you can access through iTunes. This way, you are never at a loss for music, as you can pick out your favorite genre, and pick from the thousands of stations set up. If you no longer like normal radio because of ads, DJs, or whatever, tune into an Internet radio station for a whole new experience.
Finally, one of the biggest complaints users have with iTunes (but I feel isn't all that important). With all that iTunes has to offer, it doesn't provide any kind of equalizer or skin support. Some people like messing with an equalizer constantly to get different sounds, but I think it's a waste of resources. Also, Apple has produced yet another application that is based on the Brushed Metal interface (with a little Aqua thrown in). This interface has really grown on me, and I think it looks great!
| Disc Burning (iTunes and Disc Burner): |
For burning in iTunes, it's nearly just as easy. First, you must create a simple playlist, and then drag all the songs you want to burn to that playlist. Then select that playlist, and click the button in the top right corner that says "Burn Disc". Some cool visual effects will happen, and iTunes will ask you to insert a blank CD-R. When you do that, it will ask you to press the Burn Disc button again, and it will start on its merry way. It will then convert all songs to AIFF format, and burn them in the order in which you specify.
Sure, this all integrates nicely, but what about keeping the entire computer tied up while burning. With these programs, that is a thing of the past. Now, you can burn CDs in the background, just like the way you print. This way, you can surf the web, listen to MP3's, and even play games while your disc is burning. It's about time we don't have to sit around, twiddling our thumbs while our computers burn our CDs.
But here comes something kind of confusing. Disc Burner doesn't have a way to set preferences. You will have to use the Advanced tab in the iTunes preferences to set the only two burning prefs available, Burn Speed, and Track Gaps. This is where you get to choose how fast your CD burner will burn (up to the hardware limitations), and how big of a gap there is between all your music tracks.
That brings us to drive compatibility. If you use the link in the Setup section of the review for Disc Burner, you will see a list of support drives. However, many more drives just seem to work with this software, as long as they are USB, Firewire, or IDE drives (sorry SCSI users). In fact, there are nearly as many drives supported here, as more advanced CD Burning software packages support. But the real kicker, is you don't have to pay a dime for this!
But, a free program means there are some limitations. Here are my big 5 Disc Burner omissions. First, you cannot write sessions. Sessions allow you to use a CD-R to write to part of the disc, close that session, and open a new session writing more to that disk. This can continue to be done until the disk is full. While normally I do not use multiple sessions, the option to make them would be nice.
Next, you cannot make multiple track CDs. Now, I don't mean audio songs here. I mean having a Data and Audio track (a.k.a enhanced CD). This makes it so part of the CD can be read by a computer, and another part by a normal CD player. Again, I would not use this feature too often, but some people may enjoy it.
Next is a much bigger one. With Disc Burner, you cannot create a bootable CD. Bootable CDs are very useful for when you are in a jam, and you want to use various utilities, without starting up from a bunch of different CDs. I think this should be very high on Apple's list of features to implement, as it is one of the most requested, and most useful.
Then, we have one thing many people are mad about, direct CD-to-CD copying. With Disc Burner, you cannot do this. You can copy all of the contents, and using work-arounds even the invisible files, but not everything that encompasses the latest copy protection techniques. Many people like to back up game CDs or whatever, but are not able to play from their homemade CDs without that copy protection. While Apple may have it's legal hands full if it implemented this, other burning software companies have been getting away with it for years.
Finally, the great CD-RW discs. With these discs, you can normally write to them, keep writing to them, or even remove some stuff, and erase the entire disk if you wish. You can normally change the contents of these discs up to 1,000 times without problems. However, Apple has taken a different approach to these discs. Instead of writing and erasing certain files at will, you will have to reformat the CD-RW to write more information to it. This is something they HAVE to fix.
Problems:Well, there were a few crashes with iTunes, but nothing that a restart couldn't fix. All the burning of CDs from both applications went off without a hitch (besides being a little slow), as no coasters were created on any CD burner I tried.
The only thing that could be considered a problem with Disc Burner was it would only write at 2x with my, and a friend's USB drives (that were capable of 4x). Trying to set the speed different didn't help, so it takes a little longer to write a CD with this program, but the Finder integration makes up for this shortcoming.
Conclusion:Both of these pieces of software are great additions to the Mac market. Especially since Apple is giving them away. They are not perfect yet, but once they work out some bugs, and add some sorely needed features, never again will we need to buy a MP3 player application, or expensive CD-RW software.
| MP3 Playing | |
| Pros | Cons |
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10/10 stars |
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| Disc Burning | |
| Pros | Cons |
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7/10 stars |
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Arbitrary Quote - I finally came up with a punishment for the boy. First, no leaving the house, not even for school. Second, no egg nog. In fact, no nog period! And third, absolutely no stealing for three months!