After the need of making multi-session discs to be used with both MAC and PCs, I noticed a glaring flaw in Roxio’s TOAST Ti, which is supposed to be the Nero of OS X. It still is probably the best considering it’s feature-set, but I’ve stumbled upon an alternative called Dragon Burn

For those of you who don’t know, multi-session burning is when you put in more and more data at different times until you fill the CD capacity (or “close the session,” which ever comes first). This is particularly useful since Floppy Disks are basically obsolete. And if a person contemplates to burning a single document to a CD to transport (should he or she not have a flash-based drive), then it’s an awful waste of space to put in a 20Kb file and finalize a disc that could hold 650MB So now recording software allow burning in “sessions,” which is pretty much self-explanatory.

The problem with Toast‘s way of burning multi-session discs is that you can only see all previous sessions in the MAC, the PC, if God willing will only see your most recently recorded session. Not to mention the Mac mounts these multiple “sessions” as different volumes, which is kind of irritating.

Suffice to say, in the realm of disc-burning: the PC world, with Nero to leading the charge, wins *hands down *over Apple any day, and twice on Sundays. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any promising contenders.

In the PC-World, there was GoldenHawk’s CDRWin which the “hardcore” community held with high regard. While Nero is an excellent program, it is bloated to some extent, same way Toast is. Software like CDRWin offered more control over your data, while maintaining a small memory footprint, which was a big deal when buffer-underrun protection wasn’t implemented yet. but at the expense of losing the brain-dead ease-of-use nature of the leading software.

Dragon Burn seems to be like the Apple camp’s answer to CDRWin, as you can see from the picture it hosts a ton of features (but actually I think do pretty much the same thing, with some minor adjustments) but the BIG plus I liked about it is that it supported multi-session, single volume burning. Basically it behaved the way any other normal multi-session disc should behave. I can’t really call it a “feature” since ideally, it was supposed to act that way… Roxio definitely dropped the ball on that one, and I wish they rectify it on future releases (or at least have an option). Overburn capabilities, 2 ways of verifying (sector/file level), etc. etc. Only sucky thing is that lousy starting menu it has… it looks so dated. I wish there was an Aqua version of it.

Of course the added bonus there is the smaller resource requirement compared to other bloated software. And that it works well, I mean how difficult should it be to burn something right? I’m definitely keeping Dragon Burn the question is if I’ll still need Toast for some special burns… cuz if not, then Toast is toast!