Discribe 4.0

by Charismac
$99.95, with a current special price of $74.96
$39.95 upgrade and sidegrade price, with a current special price of $29.96

Review by Gary Coyne

When started, you are presented a "quickstart" screen with only three choices:

The Data CD is used to dump a bunch of stuff from your hard drive onto a CD. The Audio is used to assemble a bunch of music tracks for a music CD, and the Copy a CD is used to make a direct copy of a music or data CD.

Once any of these are clicked and you are in that part of the program you are faced with the first oversight of Discribe--to get back to this screen there is no "obvious" click-on-a-button route. After some menu searching you can either type Command-B or File ->"Begin again..." Otherwise, there is no obvious button to click on. However, this is really irrelevant because after having clicked on any one of the buttons, you can easily go to any other part of the program via a drop-down menu. Alas, there is no difference in the windows if you get to them from the quickstart window or from any other window. All the quickstart window does is simplify the choices, nothing else.

With this in mind, there is not much of any reason to get back to the first screen in the first place. Likewise, if you wish to make (say) a Mac/ISO Hybrid, you need to get past the first screen in any account to get to the above screen's opportunities. Thus, the first screen is only a barrier to get to where you want to get to unless you want one of the three original options. Confusing? It isn't really, but what ever you do, don't click the close box or you will quit the program. Is this confusing? No, but it is frustrating.

Among the selections, a bit of detail:

The Macintosh HFS is used to make a CD from a partition on the hard drive. If you don't have an empty partition already created on your hard drive, you may find Discribe a bit limited if you are used to a selection of creating a temporary partition found in other programs--you can't do that with Discribe. So, what Charismac suggests to do is use Apple's Disk Copy (found on all Macs as it's given with away with each Mac) and use that to create a temporary partition.

What about if you want to create a bootable disk? For example, you may want to create a CD to hold the 9.1 update and you want an OS on the CD so you can boot up off the CD and then run the updater. Once the partition is created and you've added a viable operating system plus what ever files you wish to add, and you go to click on "Record" your disk, you are told that 'Discribe needs a bit of information from a bootable disk, please insert one in the recorder.' So, you need to eject your "about to be recorded upon" CD, insert a bootable CD, let Discribe get what it needs from the bootable CD, eject that CD, replace your empty CD and continue. Although this is a pain in the neck, it does work and your bootable CD will work just fine. (By the way, the instructions provided by Charismac on how to make a bootable CD are pretty bad. If you wish to receive an improved instruction guideline, click on my name above requesting the instructions and I'll send my version back to you.)

The ISO-9660 and ISO-9660 XA are both used for creating a CD for Windows-based computers with the latter (XA = Extended Architecture) especially used in multimedia like Quicktime movies, etc.

The Audio CD is for collecting your music tracks into your own CDs.

Here you can name the CD you are compiling, name the tracks, play them to verify which song is which and drag them around to your own order. The items can be AIFF, off a 2nd (music) CD, etc.

The Build a Mac HFS allows one to simply grab files from your HD, drag them in the Discribe working window and then tap on the record button. The only problem with this approach is once the CD is burnt, the files have no logical order when looking at the icon view in the finder. They become a hodgepodge of icons. If you want any "order" to how the icons appear, you are best to use the Macintosh HFS selection and create a temporary partition with Disk Copy. As long as you do not need this CD to be bootable, you do not need to add that step to the CD's creation.

It is also from Build a Mac HFS where you can do a multi-session disk. That is, let's say you want to take all your program update documents and save them onto a CD. Because you know that you will be getting more of these in the future, you can continue to save these on the same CD. Each addition to the CD will appear as a separate CD on the desktop. To remove the CD(s) from the computer, you need to drag all the CD icons to the trash. To do this though, every time you burn more data onto the CD, you have to first click on the Record button and be sure to check the Open Next Session checkmark. This prevents the CD from being finalized. Once a CD is finalized, you cannot record any more data onto the CD (unless it is a CD-RW where you can erase and then rewrite more data). As you can see in the picture below, there was room for more explanatory text. This checkbox must be checked so that the NEXT time you want to write to this disk you can. If you missed this box or didn't understand its significance, you now have a new coaster.

The Mac/ISO Hybrid is to create CDs that will be used on Macs and PCs.

The Disk Copy Image is used when you have already saved a CD to a disk image (via Apple's Disk Copy).

CD to CD/RW Copy is used when you have an external CD burner on your Mac leaving your original CD player to run the original CD allowing you to do a simple direct CD to CD copy.

One other limitation of the program is when you make a selection from the drop-down menu you are presented with the options for recording in that session. For example, when creating a bootable disk in the Macintosh HFS selection, you select the disk you wish to record and check "bootable" and "speed up" as extra options. If you wish to check and verify that you did select those two options, the only way you get to this dialogue box is to select a different type of CD recording, say Audio, not save what you just set up, and then restart what you had just set up from the beginning. As you are learning the program, this becomes very tedious very soon.

Bundled with Discribe is Audio Scribe v. 2.0. This is software that lets you record AIFF sound files for (later) recording by Discribe. This recording can be from any sound file such as a CD, microphone, or any other source hooked up to your Mac such as a turntable or tape deck.

Surprisingly, I like Discribe despite its foibles. There are, however, several things I'd like to see:

• Remove the need to insert a bootable disk when wanting to create one.
• Add the ability to make a temporary partition and to save the results.
• Remove the start up "QuickScreen."
• When a window is closed, don't quit the program.
• Let me access the setup window without having to leave a recording session and then returning.
• Be able to create CD jewel box inserts from the data in the "Audio" or "Mac HFS" windows.

Despite such a wish list, I did like Discribe and I wish I could make a stronger recommendation. However, I found the user interface both very good and very lacking. I found the pdf manual rather poor, and I found a need for extra buttons and bells such as jewel box insert creation. However, at the price Charismac is currently offering for Discribe for upgrade and sideway upgrades, it's a pretty good deal. I, for one, am looking forward to v. 5