Few of us are involved with professional disc burning, but if you are there aren’t too many choices. You’re either stuck with the consumer brands which are media suites designed for the home user to put their latest home movie or playlist on to disc or a professional level suite which offers far more functionality than you’ll ever require and can often cause more problems than they solve. It’s often best to leave everything configured to ‘default’.

For this reason, we’re keen to see other developers producing quality burning software that doesn’t require time to setup to burn your disc masters or require you to wade through layers of user interface, simply to burn a disc. Ashampoo’s Burning Studio is recommended and there are freeware apps such as the recent BurnAware that could be worth evaluating.

If you’re a Mac user, the situation is more dire. The burning software of choice is Toast, but this is also going down the home media route rather than aimed at media professionals.

Disco is a fairly new burning application that’s designed with simplicity in mind. It has all the usual burning features such as creating data discs (for backup purposes), audio CDs, discs from images and more. However, some of the standard advanced features appear to be missing. There doesn’t appear to be support for MPEG-2, so you can’t burn a DVD video disc and there’s no Blu-ray support, so you can’t attach and use an external Blu-ray burner.