Let me first state that I think burning discs is old school. I can’t remember the last time I burnt a CD or DVD, and I don’t imagine myself doing so for some time to come. There’s far better ways to transfer, store, and access your files, so stay away from discs. That said, there are times when you do need to burn a disc, or you want a system of archival that is only feasable on optical media. Whatever the case, here’s the tools to help you do just that.

Before we begin, here’s some of the things you should be looking for

Mac OS X

Burning discs with OS X is fairly simple. As soon as you insert a new blank disk, Finder offers to mount it. You then drag and drop files into the disc icon on your desktop or Finder sidebar, and then click burn. You can name the disk, as well as specify the speed at which you want to burn. If you want to burn multiple discs, first create a ‘burn folder’, and then just keep burning disc after disc.

You can use iTunes to burn music discs, iPhoto to backup your photos or export your slideshows to disc, and iDVD to make DVDs out of them. Using Disk Utility you can burn multiple sessions on a single disc.

Disco

A stunning app that redefines user interface boundaries and actually makes disc burning a fun process. The app features a minimalistic user interface, which guides you from start to finish using slick core animation effects and chewy graphics. Once you start burning however, the fun starts. The app window starts to ‘smoke’, which increases as the disc nears its end. The coolest part is, if you blow into your microphone, the smoke fades away! You have to try this app out at least once to see this brilliant user interface in action.

Look at that scrollbar UI!

Disco has a great ‘discography’ feature, which keeps a catalog of all your discs. You can quickly find which disc you burnt that PDF file for instance. It also supports Disc Spanning, which allows you to continue a single session over multiple discs. It has support for all the file systems, hybrid discs, disk image burning, and seamless multisession support. For such a small app, Disco is amazingly feature rich.

The smoke is very realistic and cool!

Currently selling for $20 a pop, it’s well worth the effort. In the past, Disco used to burn a lot of coasters, but the last two discs I burnt have come out clean. The internet forums also show signs that they’ve solved the coaster issue.

Toast Titanium

The mother of all burning apps on the Mac, this $99 behemoth features everything from burning, converting, encoding, editing, listening and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you’re totally into CDs and DVDs, this might just be your ticket to an easy life.

Let’s start with the burning. Aside from supporting all the feature you would expect, it has a very powerful media browser. Very much like the iLife Media Browser, this one adds support for Spotlight and a few other locations so you can easily drag those files into your project. The interface of course is very tastefully done (although can feel a little excessive at times).

Toast Titanium however deviates from being a burner and adds a whole bunch of other stuff you may not neat. Some might call this bloatware. You can copy video discs (non-protected content only), convert formats for playback on different platforms, watch and burn streaming media from the web, capture audio from your Mac and burn, and is the only one to support Blu-ray disc burning on the Mac.

That said, I’ve heard a lot about how Toast is the worst burning app out there. As if bloat was not bad enough, some of the tools that come with Toast refuse to work, crash, and are resource hungry. I didn’t actually use Toast to see whether it works or not, because for one, because they don’t have a trial download; two, I’m not interested.

For a full rundown of what Toast can do, you will have to visit their features page. At $99 ($60 at Amazon), it comes at a steep price. If it’s basic disc burning you need, no point in getting Toast. For those who need those features however, Toast is a great burning app.

BurnAgain FS

If for some reason you like playing with your data, and work on CDs, you might find BurnAgain FS very interesting. The application will format your disc such, that it mounts as a disk in Finder. You can then drag and drop files in it, edit your files, and delete files as well. Of course, behind the scenes every change you make creates a new file while hiding the earlier file, but the process is transparent to the user.

After this, the disc mounts in your Finder sidebar

In these days, with the abundance of cheap flash storage, I don’t see why you would want to work off a CD or DVD. Note that it will only allow you to do this on CDs and DVD-rewritables. Single write DVDs are not supported (not by BurnAgain, nor by any app on the Mac).

Overall, for $20 it’s a good app, if you want to put your data at risk.

Discblaze

DiscBlaze seems to be stuck in time. The features that make for a good disc burner are all present, but the user interface is just plain old. That said, it’s loaded on features that you would like to see in a disc burner.

Multiple sessions, test burns, custom icons for HFS+ discs (for your Mac app), creating disk images, Hybrid disc options, as well as a host of file systems such as HFS+, UDF, and ISO9660. Although, at $20 for a single license, coupled with the aqua-ish UI, something doesn’t feel right.

LiquidCD

A brilliant application if you’re looking out for a free but feature right burner. You can burn Data discs, Audio (Mp3 or CD), Photos (just archives), Videos (compatible with DVD players), and copying discs. The user interface is simple and lightweight with no fancy animations or swooshy windows. You can notice how the developer has integrated the app with Mac OS X. For one you can Quick Look files right from within the app. You also get access to the iLife Media browser when you’re making an Audio or Photo disc.

You can burn ISO images, bin/cue images. The audio burner will grab meta info from the cloud which can then be displayed on compatible audio players.

So far no one has had any issues with burning with LiquidCD (neither did I).

ShadowBurn

This is one feature rich disc burner. Featuring a standard ‘disc burning’ user interface, ShadowBurn has all the features you would require to burn a good CD or DVD. For one, you can either drag and drop files into its dock icon to create projects, or add them using the contextual menu in Finder.

One of the neat features of ShadowBurn is Hybrid discs. This allows you to burn Mac/PC discs, where if the disc is accessed on either platform, the files pertaining to the other platform stay hidden. So I could burn a Pages document and a Word document to a disc, and the PC users will not even see the Pages document.

ShadowBurn also supports a whole bunch of ISO formats, including UDF, Joliet, Mp3 and the like. I like that you can switch between file systems and the app will take care of the ‘background noise’. For instance, if you switch from standard to ‘mp3′ mode, it will weed out stuff that’s not going to play on your Mp3 player. What ShadowBurn does not have is options to choose between a Photo disc, Video, Audio and such. There’s only a single mode that you can go through.

A single license costs $15, which I think is a great price for a disc burner.

The choice is yours

There were a couple of other burning apps that I found, but they were either too old or lacked features that you would expect. I cannot make a choice, since I don’t use optical media to burn my content. Based on my short experiences and price, I would choose LiquidCD. It’s robust, has a good UI, and nice features. I would have chosen Disco, but my past memories of burning coasters hasn’t been good. If someone can confirm that it has stopped doing that, its definitely worthy of the best-burning-app title.