Musical tastes may change, but CD labels are forever.

BeLight’s Disc Cover helps you create perfect labels and booklets to identify what’s on your burned discs. If Apple’s iApps are streamlined tools, Disc Cover is like a great big toolbox: a little messy, but it gets the job done.

You can start from scratch or edit existing templates. Like any Disc Cover document, templates can consist of several designs (CD templates contain a disc label, CD tray insert, and so on) and you can jump between them in Disc Cover’s single-window workspace. You can add album art and pictures from iTunes and iPhoto, as well as import text information about your files. Import an iTunes playlist, artist names, and track times and more details automatically appear beside your design. This text can be arranged with different presets (“artist name/track title,” for example) and dragged into your document. However, importing data about files within a folder structure takes too many steps, and imported information disappears when you close your document. You’ll have to reimport it if you want to quickly replace a track list with the same info organized a different way, for example.

Disc Cover offers no freehand or Bézier drawing tools, but you can add lines, simple shapes, and text on horizontal or circular paths to your designs. A foreground/background tab provides simple layer functions, and Disc Cover includes image-editing controls that let you crop, adjust colors, and apply filters—though a few effects obnoxiously require the purchase of other BeLight software to be used fully, something the app’s documentation doesn’t make clear. We were vexed by the inability to simply nudge an image within a picture box. This is especially unfortunate because Disc Cover’s Collage and Smart Shape features make it easy to fill funky predesigned boxes with your pictures or those from the vast included clipart library. Worse, we encountered a recurring bug that caused images to disappear from our designs. Quitting the app and reopening the affected file—sometimes more than once—corrected the problem.

Disc Cover is about printing as much as it’s about creating and editing, and the app includes preset layouts for a wide range of paper labels. Disc Cover also supports direct-to-disc printers as well as laser etching with LightScribe and LabelFlash compatible drives. Printing is simple: Just select the appropriate preset layout and drag and drop designs to Disc Cover’s print preview window.

If you only want to make a booklet for an audio CD, iTunes is fine. But if you want to express yourself on a variety of homemade media, Disc Cover—rough edges and all—might be just the tool you need.

COMPANY: BeLight
CONTACT: www.belightsoft.com
PRICE: $39.95
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later
Easy-to-use editing features. Includes a wealth of templates and clip art. Universal binary.
Some key features have annoying limitations. Disappearing image bug.