Platforms: Mac OS X 10.3.9 and up

Current version as of writing: 2.3

Apple’s approach to media burning is actually interesting because so much is either built into OS X or integrated into specific apps (e.g. iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, etc.). For a lot of users, that covers all their needs and eliminates the necessity for a standalone burning app. But sometimes it’s just nice to have a one-stop shop. Or if you’re a Mac convert coming from PC-land, maybe you just got used to using an all-encompassing app that takes care of everything.

On the features front, Burn does all the standard stuff you’d expect. It’ll burn data and music discs and can copy CDs and DVDs (as long as the DVD isn’t copy protected). Making data and music discs is just a nice, easy process of dragging and dropping.

But let’s get to some of the geekier features that make Burn really stand out. First up, let’s talk about CD-text. Maybe it’s just my own strange little fetish, but I seem to find myself using CD-text as a barometer for burning software quality fairly often. Maybe that’s because a lot of burning apps either don’t do CD-text or they do it so badly that they may as well not have bothered. Burn not only does it, but it does it in an intelligent way. In the preferences panel, under ‘Audio’ there’s a check box that turns on CD-text writing, and Burn (usually) gets the text burned in a way that’s actually convenient for seeing on your CD player’s display, which is where many others fall down.

If you don’t need CD-text at all because you just use CDs filled with mp3s, Burn’s got something for you, too. If, for example, all your tunes are ripped in 320kbps, but you want to maximize how many will fit on your disc (at the expense of a little fidelity), there’s a setting under the ‘Audio’ section that will tell Burn to cut the bitrate down and then burn the songs to the disc. Pretty slick.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t go over a bunch of detail about video codecs (there’ll probably be a feature entry about that enormous topic in the not-too-distant future), but one of the very coolest features of Burn is its ability to convert video before burning it to your media. Some of the biggies available are VCD and DivX.

Finally, a feature that Burn includes but very few other burning apps include is a DVD authoring. Burn bundles a small utility called MenuEdit, and with it you can add some slick (albeit simple) menus to your DVD projects. It’ll let you throw in background images, icons, and has a few other fun little menu tweaks available to play with.

I could go on and on, but I’ll call it good here and let you play with Burn and discover any other tweaky features that happen to be important for the projects you work on.