Burn for Mac

It’s been almost two years since MacBeth arrived, but every so often I still find myself rooting around on the Web for software. Today, I needed a decent disc burning utility. I find Mac OS X’s Disk Utility app woefully inadequate to create CDs and DVDs, and (gasp!) it was the first time I had to use my system’s superdrive to burn a DVD. So, I happened upon Burn, a compact application that makes creating CDs and DVDs easy, while still giving you a lot of options.

Burn “doesn’t reinvent the wheel”, says its developer, Maarten Foukhar, using a number of existing Unix utilities to create, recreate, convert data, audio and video discs. It’s interface is about as simple as it gets — select the type of disc you want to create, choose among the given options, drag and drop the files into Burn, and click on the ‘Burn’ button. That’s it. Burn will make audio CDs, audio DVDs, VCDs, DVD videos, DivX videos, burn disc images, copy discs and more. It can work with a variety of filesystems, such as ISO, UDF, Joliet and HFS+.

Oh, and did I mention Burn is open source? 🙂

One of the factors that went into the decision to buy MacBeth was the availability of freeware. I was afraid that moving away from the Windows platform would mean having to give up freeware heaven. As it turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s true that Windows corners most of the free software segment — understandable since it accounts for a vast majority of computer users — but there is very decent pickings for Mac users as well. Here’s a quick list of the freeware I’ve been using reliably on my Mac (running Snow Leopard):

• Office Suite: OpenOffice
• Antivirus: iAntivirus
• Media player: VLC
• Graphics: Gimp
• iPod Manager: Yamipod, and not iTunes, which is very annoying
• Browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Opera
• IM: Adium

I’m sure I’m missing some…

~PD